


Open Up, This Is a Raid

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Split, Pre-Hiatus (Fall Out Boy), post apocalyptic road trip of ultimate destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-03-21 08:40:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3685641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world ends and Pete doesn't die. Really he's more surprised than anyone but now all he's left with is Brendon Urie and the two thousand miles between Los Angeles and Chicago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is set in summer 2009 pre-fob hiatus and post-folie, and after p!atd decided to split but before they announced it to the public. i had to fudge the dates around a little bit but later on i’m going to make a reference to a movie that came out in 2012 so we’re all just going to have to accept some artistic license here. title is from the song you are not alone by mavis staples.

The mother of all stress headaches is building in Pete's skull. 

It's part dehydration, way too many cups of shitty office coffee trying to make these meetings bearable, and part the shiny white rooms the music executives insisted on using. One of the top-dog executives is pontificating some obscure point about refusal rights and his voice is drilling right into Pete’s brain. The florescent lights buzz overhead in perfect counterpoint to his headache.

Pete's phone buzzes silently in his pocket. He shuffles it out with a practiced shimmy and glances at it. 

_rather b literally anywhere but here,_ it reads. Pete glances up. 

Brendon smiles at him broadly across the table and rolls his eyes meaningfully. His grin is manic-wide and shiny, but there’s an unpleasant twist to it. Pete has to snort and tilt his head in silent agreement. 

“Mister Wentz, if I'm boring you,” the executive snaps from the head of the table. 

He sounds like every petty, annoyed schoolteacher Pete’s ever had and he wants to throw his cold cup of coffee so badly his palm itches. Instead Pete puts his elbows on the shiny white laminate of the table and leans forward, smiling his widest, sweetest smile. The executive suddenly looks significantly less sure of himself, faced with a Wentzian mouthful of flashing white teeth. 

“Not at all,” Pete lies effortlessly. “We were discussing refusal rights?” 

Across the table Brendon smirks, unrepentant. 

It’s the fourth day of negotiations – or maybe the fifth, Pete’s starting to lose track of time in the blur of shiny white conference rooms and terse phone calls – and Pete is about ready to quit it all and move to Africa. All of it is necessary, if Brendon wants the album deal he’s angling for, but it’s starting to wear on everyone. 

Pete’s getting kind of tired of the fixed grin on Brendon’s face, the fake stiffness of it. It looks plastic and whenever Pete sees it he remembers what Brendon had looked like when he’d first met the kid, riding Ross’s enthusiasm and bravado as desperately as he’s riding Pete’s now. He’d looked younger then, scared and less experienced. Innocent, maybe.

Brendon’s not innocent anymore – and Pete’s probably to blame for that – but some habits die hard and the big, grinning mask is one that’s served him well enough so far. It seems to fool the executives, at least. They’re lining up a whole new album, a whole new sound, what Brendon had sacrificed half his band to get. Everyone’s practically falling over themselves to offer Pete’s favorite pet project their attention. 

Pete’s sick to death of the fucking business but he isn’t going to take that out on Brendon’s career. Panic has the potential to go far, with or without Ross.

+8+

“I miss Vegas,” Brendon tells him when they break for lunch seven days into the endless parade of business meetings. Pete’s not totally sure what he means by that – I miss my band or I miss my family or I miss, whatever, the actual fucking city. But he does know that there’s something about the twist to Brendon’s mouth that says there’s going to be a collapse soon.

“We’re going to have to postpone the meetings after lunch,” he tells the secretaries breezily, smiling wide and bright and immoveable when they frown and try to get him to change his mind. One of the biggest upsides of being that one guy that has public meltdowns, he knows. People basically expect him to throw his weight around.

The relief in the slump of Brendon’s shoulders when Pete tells him they have the rest of the day off is worth it. There’s a lot of stress involved in convincing people to give you lots of money, who knew?

“Let’s get a Slurpee,” Pete suggests. Brendon shrugs and follows him out of the icily air-conditioned corporate office.

Brendon doesn’t say anything about the fact that Pete drives an hour out into the suburbs surrounding LA to find them, quote, ‘the _perfect_ convenience store’. He just grins along with it, increasingly sincere, and turns the volume of the radio up. It’s a pop station and he sings along with every song.

The store Pete choses is a tiny family-owned thing, square and squat and ugly as hell. Pete’s instantly charmed. Brendon smiles at it politely, nodding along with Pete’s words. He’s not really paying attention to what he’s saying, running his mouth about plans for the day, something about catching a movie, going incognito.

It’s more likely than not they’re going to drive right back to the hotel they’re staying at and pass out in their separate rooms but it’s nice to dream.

The girl running the cash register recognizes Brendon but not, Pete is secretly grateful for, Pete himself. She completely ignores him in favor of leaning out from behind her counter to watch as Brendon traipses over to the Slurpee machine and dutifully examines the selection. Pete idly considers grabbing a coffee but opts to stay over by the freezer of beer instead. He’s too tired to smile and chat about Fall Out Boy, not with a fan. Disappointing someone else today would be more than Pete really wants to deal with. 

He stares at the clock above the register. It’s got a Coke logo and a pinup girl on it and it’s a couple of minutes slow, not that Pete cares. He’s mostly concerned with the coolness of the freezer against his back. Hot desert LA isn’t Chicago and he misses home, the cold, dirty city he grew up in. Shit, he misses Joe and Andy and Patrick. Maybe he does kind of understand what Brendon had meant when he’d said he missed Vegas.

He flicks that thought away before it can settle, refocusing on the cool glass under his fingertips. Brendon’s chattering away to the cashier in the background, something about her school and how much she loves Panic’s newest single. Brendon sounds happy, like he hadn’t when he’d been hashing through endless paperwork an hour ago.

She mentions Ross a breath later and Pete closes his eyes tiredly.

Brendon’s voice changes, goes tight. Not enough so the girl would notice, but Pete can tell he’s suddenly not dealing so well. He’s not going to let something slip – he’s a consummate professional, Pete can’t help admiring it – but it can’t be pleasant to hear.

He’s pushing away from the refrigerator door to go rescue him when the floor heaves under his feet.

It settles a second later, and the store is silent. Pete is frozen, like Brendon and the cashier seem to be. All he can hear is the tick of the stupid Coke clock, the buzz of the freezers. Somewhere off in the distance a car alarm goes off.

“Was that an earthquake?” Brendon breaks the silence to ask, and the earth heaves again in answer. It lasts longer, a couple of seconds. Pete stumbles and almost topples into in a pile of discount Fritos. Somewhere outside someone raises their voice in alarm. The words are incoherent but the tone is unmistakable.

Panic.

Brendon’s cup of Slurpee slips from his hand and hits the ground in a splatter of lime-green, startlingly bright and breaking the unmoving calm. He grabs at the counter for support as the ground rolls again sharply. 

“What’s happening?” he demands and Pete is still frozen himself, speechless with shock. The girl doesn’t answer, shoving open the trapdoor in the counter and stepping out from behind it. The floor is still shifting, making it difficult to walk, but it's stilled the most violent yawing for the moment.

“Stay inside and away from the shelves, it’s just an earthquake,” the girl says hastily, shoving past Brendon and making her way to the door. Her words don’t match her tone, too confident for how her voice is wavering. There’s nothing confident about the jerky speed with which she crosses the room. “There’s a basement in the back if it gets much worse, there’s no shelves in it, that should be okay!” 

The door opens and then closes behind the girl in a burst of noise, babbling voices and a cracking sound too, like a stick breaking in slow motion. For the space of a second Pete can hear a voice rise into a scream, sharp and nervy. Then the door swings shut, cutting the sound off into nothing but a dull murmur.

The ground convulses again, rolls under them and doesn’t stop. Sickness is gathering in Pete’s stomach, a nasty hybrid of seasickness and the knowledge that the floor should be _solid_. Floors didn’t move, didn’t act like this.

“What do we do?” Brendon shouts over the sound of bottles falling off the meager wine rack. The counter he’s clinging to appears to be the only thing keeping him upright.

Cold fear settles in Pete’s gut but he swallows it down and tries to think.

“Basement,” he shouts over the noise of a shelf toppling towards the front of the store. The ground isn’t still but it’s slowing again for the moment and he waddles awkwardly over, grabbing Brendon by the sleeve of the jacket. Brendon follows him towards the back of the store the girl had indicated, so close he’s almost trying to fuse with Pete’s back.

The basement is conveniently labeled and Pete only has to battle with the doorknob for a few seconds before he gets it open. There’s no lock but there is a light switch and he flips it on to reveal a single light over a set of steep cement steps leading into a dark concrete room.

The ground is moving again, harder than before and as Pete takes the first step down the stairway he hears a bottle shatter on the floor towards the front of the store. Absurdly, all he can think about is the glass he’d thrown across the studio a year ago, the shattering and then the silence. Patrick’s face, angry and betrayed, the tiredness and disinterest in Joe and Andy.

There’s no silence now. Brendon shuts the door behind them but they can still make out the thump of things falling off shelves as they descend unsteadily into the dark basement.

Pete pulls out his phone and shines it around. Brendon’s still close behind him, staring over his shoulder. 

The basement is tiny, barely a hundred square feet, and dingy as hell. The walls are bare concrete and the floor is dirty. There’s a counter running the length of the far wall, a sparse rack of tools shoved into the corner. Brendon walks over, barely balancing against the movement of the floor, and pulls a flashlight off it. 

“It’s not like it’s stealing,” he says into the nearly-silence. “Borrowing.” 

Pete doesn’t have time to reply. The floor pitches again, so hard he can see the bend in the ground. His knees hit cement in a brilliant burst of pain and his phone skitters away across the floor, meeting Brendon’s dropped flashlight. In the wildly swinging light Brendon’s face is briefly illuminated, white with terror. 

Pete crawls instead of trying to stand and test his balance, scoops his phone into his pocket on the way past and crawls on to where Brendon’s huddled against the wall. Brendon’s hand finds his in the dark, clinging tightly. 

Brendon’s known Pete way too long to really idolize him anymore – fuck, Pete's self-aware enough to know he’s a tiny loser with a big smile, a talent for attracting talented people, and not much else – but he’s staring at Pete now like Pete will fix it. Fix everything. Find them safety.

Pete looks away and stares at the floor. He can’t do anything right now.

+8+

Pete wakes up slowly.

He’d dozed off somewhere around the second hour, when it had become obvious that the earthquake wasn’t going to wind down anytime soon. Pete wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard of an earthquake lasting more than a few minutes, much less more than an hour. He tries not to think about that. 

On the heels of the dismissal is a sneaking idea, something like the cartoon flier from the Cold War, the bomb shelters and _duck and cover_. He does his best not to think about that either. There’s nothing he can do even if there _are_ bombs falling less than ten feet above his head. 

The floor has settled though, more or less, down to the occasional shudder or roll. Enough that he’d fallen into a trancelike daze, Brendon leaning against his shoulder, flashlight rolling softly back and forth against the drain grate. 

There’s something in the air, though, a new feeling, or maybe a sound. Pete hears it before he’s even conscious of it but it gets louder and louder until he’s blinking sleep from his eyes, listening closely. 

It’s a deep, pounding sound, so soft it’s only evident in the pauses between the impacts. It’s gaining, though, pressing into Pete’s ears in a way he’s never felt a sound do before. It’s disorienting, fucking with his balance even though he’s sitting down. He shakes his head a few times, trying to clear his head. 

Brendon’s head comes off his shoulder when he moves, expression twisting out of the corner of Pete’s eye. His mouth is moving but his words don’t reach Pete’s ear as anything but a distant buzz. 

All Pete can hear is a deep, pounding bass beat. It invades his ears and burrows into his brain in dull impacts, regular, syncopated. Like a heartbeat. Or a dancefloor.

He stumbles to his feet, staring up the stairs at the door to the floor above. It's shivering a little in its frame with the tremendous, endless sound. Brendon stares up at him from the floor, eyes wide and terrified. Pete can't look away from the door.

There are people up there.

The thought seeps into his head on the heels of every pounding thud. There are people. There are people up there. He should go up there. It's safe. He could be out of the basement. Escape the fear. All he needs to do is go outside. Where the people are. Where it's safe.

He's not aware of moving, of the weaving steps he has to have taken to cross the room, until his foot settles on the first step up the stairs. Until Brendon tackles him to the ground, shouting incoherently, impossible to hear over the deepening bass tone.

Pete notes vaguely that Brendon has one ear covered, has tucked his other ear against his shoulder. Clumsily he fights back, shoves at the hand Brendon's using to hold him down. There's something wrong with his limbs though, they move too slowly. They don’t respond fast enough.

Panic sparks dimly somewhere in the back of his brain and drowns under the tide of the interminable sound. He can’t think, he can’t _think_.

Brendon drops the hand from his ear for a moment, yanking his sweater over his head. He's got it tied around Pete's hands a second later, loose and inept but enough to stop him now. When his limbs don’t work, when his muscles are just so much sluggish meat. 

When the knot is tied to his satisfaction Brendon jams his hands back over his ears and sits back on Pete's legs. Pete’s trapped and he beats his tied arms against Brendon’s chest hopelessly. He can’t put any force in the impact.

“Brendon, Brendon,” he hears someone say and it takes him a minute to figure out it’s himself talking. He doesn’t remember deciding to talk. The words coming out of his mouth feel foreign, like they aren’t even his.

Brendon drops forward, pressing his face into Pete’s chest and clenches his knees together around Pete’s thighs. Pete’s trapped, his arms pinned under Brendon’s chest and his legs nothing more than loose deadweight. Nothing left for him to move but his mouth.

“Let me go, please, there are people up there, Brendon,” he begs. Brendon shakes his head and tucks his face more securely into Pete’s shoulder. He's crying or maybe he’s talking, his body is shaking but Pete can’t hear anything except the words in his mouth and always that pounding bass. Distantly Pete's sorry but he can't stop.

“Please, _please_ ,” he begs, until he can’t even distinguish the noise coming out of him into words, can’t make his thoughts stick together enough to tell what words even are.

He has to get out. He has to go up to where the noise is coming from. He can't stop the incoherent noises coming out of his mouth and he doesn't even want to. Brendon has to let him go. It’s safe up there. It’s _safe_.

+8+

Pete wakes with a start.

He can’t breathe and for a long moment he panics mindlessly, thrashing against the weight on his chest. His arms are stuck, and he can’t remember why they would be. It's dark, the only light a flickering, dim flashlight in the corner of a familiar basement.

The weight on his chest squeaks and topples sideways and Pete rolls his head to the side to meet Brendon’s wide eyes. His glasses are scuffed but uncracked. He’s staring at Pete too intently, eyes bruised with that special insomniac mania that Pete knows too intimately.

Pete tries to wiggle away and discovers Brendon’s sweater tied around his forearms.

“What the fuck,” he says. His voice comes out hoarse and cracked and Pete tries to swallow. His tongue feels swollen and his mouth is dry. His throat burns when he finally manages to swallow. It tastes worryingly like blood. 

“You don’t remember?” Brendon asks quietly.

Pete stops in his squirming efforts to yank his arms out of Brendon’s sweater. His brain is a mess of static right now, like it always is when he crashes after a few too many days in a row without sleep. It’s hard to think through, his thoughts patchy and disconnected and slow.

The basement, yeah. He remembers… the earthquake. The earthquake that wasn’t an earthquake, was more like the world ending. The heaving in the floor like the ground was going to split beneath their feet, like the planet was shaking apart. Longer than any earthquake Pete’s ever heard of. Minutes and minutes.

And then- And then the noise. He remembers that.

“Fuck,” he hisses, and thrashes his way out of the sweater at last. Brendon flinches when Pete reaches for him but he doesn’t pull away and Pete tugs him over to examine him. He’s not bruised, not where Pete can see. Pete hadn’t hurt him.

“Shit Bren, I’m so sorry,” he whispers. Brendon shrugs and doesn’t meet Pete’s eyes.

“You weren't yourself,” Brendon mutters. Pete lets go and stares down at his hands. There's dirt pressed into the knuckles. The smudgy remnants of black Sharpie on his nails, oh god. He'd done that just yesterday, bored and disgusted with the unending business meetings and ceaseless pastel business casual. He’d been thinking that this hadn’t been what he’d signed up for when he’d pinned his hopes on Fall Out Boy.

“What was that?” Pete asks quietly. Brendon shrugs tiredly. 

“Noise. I covered my ears when it started getting in my head. You’d have to tell me.” His voice sounds exhausted. 

Pete means to answer, he really does, but when he tries to think of the words for it they stumble and die in his mouth. How could he explain how the sound hadn’t been a sound at all, had been a compulsion? The knowledge that he _had_ to go up, go out, out into the streets. The sound had been the Pied Piper and Pete had been nothing but an entranced little mouse. 

He doesn’t say anything, just presses his hand to his mouth for far longer than would be polite and then laughs his fakest laugh and waves the thought away. 

“How long has it been, since-,” he stops and gestures helplessly. He can't say earthquake, he knows that wasn't what it was. He can't say the end of the world either because it _wasn't_.

He doesn't want to say anything about the noise.

Either way Brendon shrugs. “A while I think,” he says. “I slept for a bit so I don’t know, I left my phone... up there.”

Pete fumbles with his pockets, wrests his phone free eventually. Its screen is cracked but it flickers on when Pete thumbs the power button. There's no service and it’s almost dead but it tells him it's ten in the morning. They'd gone down into the basement in the late afternoon. It'd been about sixteen hours.

“Do you think we can go up there?” he asks. The floor is still under them and it's quiet when he listens.

“I guess,” Brendon says. He doesn’t sound like he likes the idea at all. “I haven't heard anything for a while. It might be safe.”

“We can't stay down here, can we?” Pete asks desperately. He can feel the walls like they’re pressing against his skin, claustrophobic and dank. He's never really been a fan of basements. “We don't have any food.”

“We don’t,” Brendon agrees and presses his face into his hands for a long moment. His face is pale but set when he finally looks up. “Let’s go check, then.”

The door doesn’t open when Pete tries the knob, not even when he puts his shoulder against it and heaves. Pete and Brendon both have to brace themselves and shove. It takes all of their weight before it pops open with the sound of falling rubble.

Tiny pieces of drywall bounce down the stairs around their feet. He can just make out the shelf that had fallen against the door, now lying on the floor in a scatter of candy bars. Dust billows after them, clouding the air and making Pete cough. It tastes metallic and dirty. A construction site taste.

The ground floor is a mess when they climb out into it. The shelves are on the floor and Pete pops bags of chips underfoot with every other step. The lights are dangling from the ceiling from fraying wires and Pete gives then a wide berth. The ceiling seems solid at least, bless the cinderblock shoebox design of convenience stores.

Brendon hangs back, poking around in the mess of shelves. Pete steps through the hole where the glass of a display window had been.

The city is a wasteland.

There's not a building over a story tall left, not anywhere that Pete can see. The houses on the streets around them are all rubble, smoking foundations and walls toppling under their own weight. He can kind of taste it on his tongue, a beef-jerky taste that coats the back of his throat thickly when he breathes. Shards of glass wink at him from where they’re scattered in the street. 

It's silent all around them. Not proper silence, exactly. There's still the sound of unsteady masonry giving way every few minutes, the creak of settling lumber, the crackle of small fires. But there's no voices, none of the screaming Pete was expecting. No engines, no cars or trucks. It’s an odd not-quiet that presses against Pete’s ears.

There's a smudge of smoke low over where the city proper should be, obscuring whatever happened to it. Pete's pretty sure he should be thankful.

He gasps in a lungful of dust and smoke when Brendon's hand touches his arm. He'd forgotten somehow in the scant seconds that he wasn't totally, utterly alone.

“I have to find Patrick,” Pete says dazedly. It’s all he can think about, that Patrick’s in the middle of this too. Patrick has to be safe. He _has_ to be.

He can't stop staring at the building across the street. It's a ruin, four walls and a pile of rubble where the roof had caved in. It's like a war film, something out of a Lifetime channel special or something. Something that happened in far-away Middle-Eastern countries. Not warm little California suburbs.

“Spencer,” he hears Brendon say. He tears his eyes away from a scrap of curtain waving in the breeze and looks.

“Spencer too,” Brendon says defiantly, meeting his eyes with strength Pete shouldn't be surprised to see. His face is dusty and flushed and there are tear-tracks marked out too clearly to deny, but his expression doesn't waver. “We're finding him too.”

“What if he's-,” Pete says without thinking and then stutters to a stop. What if, indeed.

Brendon's face goes white but he doesn't respond to Pete's unfinished thought. Instead he turns to stare into the ruined building they'd emerged from.

“Spencer's in Vegas,” he says grimly. “Where's Patrick?”

“Chicago,” Pete says numbly. “Joe and Andy too. Are you... What about the rest of... What about Ross?”

He sees the full-body flinch that Brendon can't suppress. Brendon doesn't say anything though, just steps back a pace into the shadows of what used to be the interior.

“We're going to need supplies,” Brendon says, ignoring the question. “And a car.”

Pete glances at the tiny parking lot. It's a mess of buckled pavement and there's an overturned SUV resting right across the entrance. Pete's own car has a light pole laying across it, crushing the roof into the carriage. It's sparking dangerously. Brendon follows his gaze and then turns away back into the store without a word. 

“If we wanted to find a car rental place they'd have some fueled up,” Pete offers after a moment, following Brendon into the shady ruins. He feels useless, used up by the silence already. Emptied out with the magnitude of what he's facing. God, he needs Patrick.

“Good plan,” Brendon says absently. He's rifling through the piles of flyers next to the patch of rubble that had been the cash register. “What about food?”

“I don't know,” he says uselessly. For a moment he's achingly envious of the way that Brendon's handling himself, steady and rational.

Then he catches sight of the way the flyers are slipping through Brendon's hands, how his fingers are shaking. How tight his shoulders are pulling. Brendon isn't doing any better than he is.

Brendon lets out a rough almost-sob when Pete pulls him up roughly into a hug. It's almost a wrestling match for a moment, hands grappling against shoulders and pressing against each other too closely, too awkwardly. It's prime joke material and neither of them says a word.

“We can do this,” Pete says eventually because someone has to. Brendon nods against his shoulder and doesn't let go for another desperate moment.

He shoves away at last, scrubbing at his face with both hands and knocking his stupid glasses askew. Pete takes the opportunity to swipe at his leaky nose.

“Food,” Brendon reiterates. His voice is cracking but strong. “And water, Vegas is a desert. And, and weapons.”

“You really think we'll need them?” Pete asks weakly. Brendon glances over incredulously, face lightening for a fraction of a second.

“Of course we'll need weapons dude,” he says with a tone like Pete's being an idiot. “Have you even _played_ Fallout?”

His expression says he's serious.

“Of course,” Pete repeats faintly. Christ, they're _fucked._

It almost takes longer to figure out how to use a paper map – wrangled from the piles of flyers on the floor – than it would to walk to the rental agency. Pete’s done it a couple of times before and it reminds him for a brief moment of the van, of the band. Brendon’s never done it before and he lets Pete handle it.

Eventually he finds a place close enough to walk to and figures out the route. He marks it out with a red pen stolen from a pack on the ground and memorizes the number of turns because he’s not sure how many road signs will still be standing.

Brendon occupies himself by pulling a pair of drawstring bags from a pile by the door and filling them with trail mix and bottles of water. He stares defiantly at Pete when he catches Pete looking but Pete doesn’t say anything. He’s pretty sure the owner is either dead or… whatever the noise had done to the people who hadn’t had a Brendon to stop them from following it out.

He doesn’t want to think about it. Either way he doesn’t feel too bad about liberating a couple pounds of assorted nuts and some water bottles.

“It looks like… two miles away?” Pete says at last. Brendon grunts an acknowledgement and throws Pete the bag full of water bottles.

They hesitate at the door, staring out into the sunny, ruined neighborhood. It’s still, silent, the same as when they’d first emerged. Not a person in sight, not a sound of human life. Not a sound of any life, really. Pete doesn’t want to take the step out the door. Brendon doesn’t want to either if the way he hovers at Pete’s shoulder is any indication.

“We should get going,” he mutters after a long beat of silent staring out into the world. He’s scuffing a foot against a piece of drywall on the floor when Pete glances back. He won’t meet Pete’s eyes and Pete feels something welling up in the pit of his stomach. It’s cold and sick and feels a lot like fear.

He can’t do this on his own. He _knows_ he can’t.

“We can do this?” he says to Brendon. He tries to make it come out confident but it falls flat, wavers too much with uncertainty and thick dread. Brendon finally looks at him though, smiles wanly through the dust on his face. His eyes look lost but he hikes his shoulders higher at least.

“We can,” he affirms, shoulders his way past Pete and leads the way out of the store.

For all the tension the walk is interminably boring. The buildings are the same, ruined by the earthquake and slowly falling to gravity. Houses, mostly. Pete keeps one eye on the map and the other on the lookout for any sign of human life. Every now and then some unstable part of a nearby structure will give up and topple. Every time Pete flinches and Brendon jumps. It’s never anything but random chance. It’s never other people.

The smudge of smoke on the horizon where downtown had been grows larger every time Pete thinks to look at it. He doesn’t mention it but it worries him. He doesn’t know what’s possible anymore, not with what had happened in the basement. The sound that had gotten into his brain. He doesn't know what the rules are anymore, if there even _are_ any. 

“I’m not seeing any bodies,” Brendon comments at last, a couple of blocks later. Pete jumps at his voice, sudden and unexpected. There’s something about the oppressive ruination all around them that suppresses any attempt at talking, makes the human voice sound intrusive.

Brendon’s right, in any case. There isn’t a single body, not even what Pete would expect to result from a regular earthquake. The sidewalks are scattered with wood, cement, drywall, but no blood. He can’t smell any on the breeze either, just smoke and that construction-site smell.

“Maybe in the buildings?” he offers at last.

The image rises unbidden in his head, someone pinned under their collapsed ceiling. Dead, or worse. Buried alive and unable to make a sound. He shakes it away, his stomach rolling.

“I don’t want to check,” Brendon says. He sounds as sick as Pete feels.

“We don’t have to,” Pete says, puts a finality into his tone that he really doesn’t feel.

Brendon doesn’t respond, just edges closer until their arms are brushing and keeps walking. There would be emergency services soon, Pete reasons with himself, swooping in to save them all. A whole city doesn’t just collapse, not without getting a serious amount of attention. The government would be here soon. 

Pete ignores the fact that _he_ isn’t exactly sitting and waiting out the disaster himself. Irrelevant. 

The walk takes almost an hour mostly because Pete takes them the wrong way but they get there in the end. Standing on a buckled sidewalk, staring out across a hefty parking lot full of cars. Utterly deserted, utterly still. Just like everywhere else. 

The cars are fine for the most part, dust-covered but gleaming rows of metal tops stretching across the parking lot. Pete has a moment of vertigo looking at them, at how many there are, how many choices. _What car should you drive in the apocalypse,_ he thinks to himself hysterically and giggles. Brendon doesn’t even eye him oddly for it, just steps gingerly through the shattered picture windows into the rental office. 

Pete follows him in and catches his breath in the dimmer, more contained space. It’s in disarray, scattered flyers making the floor treacherous and slippery and a coffee machine lying in a crusted brown puddle, but it’s not a total loss. 

“You want to look for keys?” Brendon asks, eyeing the pile of papers and wrecked computer hardware that’s the clerk’s desk with apprehension. “I’ll go looking for gas and stuff.” 

“Sure,” Pete says tiredly, and walks over to start shifting through the piles of junk. There are keys scattered through the whole mess, hanging from electronic fobs and little plastic tags describing their respective cars specifications. 

He has to toss aside multiple convertibles with pained sighs. 

“What’s the difference between a hatchback and a sedan?” Pete calls in the direction of the back room Brendon had gone to explore, staring at the nearly identical piles of keys in front of him. They glint back at him unhelpfully. 

“No idea,” Brendon’s muffled reply comes. “What’s a gas can look like?” 

“Red,” Pete calls back and scoops up the hatchback pile. “I think?” 

“Right,” Brendon says, and then there’s a clattering crash like he’d knocked over a pile of something heavy and metallic. The noise is followed by a storm of swearing but it sounds more annoyed than in pain so Pete steps back into the sunlight without too much worry. 

Pete’s braced for it but the sound of the car alarm startles him so bad he drops his whole bundle of keys. Clicking the first few alarm buttons attached to the keys had resulted in nothing but more oppressive silence. The fifth one had done it and he holds on to that key through sheer luck. 

He silences the alarm when he spots the car’s blinking lights and trots over to examine it. 

The car isn’t a van, more like a sedan, and the gas mileage Pete reads from the documentation in the window isn’t terrible, not by a long shot. The interior looks alright, if dusty and a little worn. Cargo space not bad. 

Pete unlocks the door and climbs into the driver’s seat. It smells like dust and Febreeze. The pleather steering wheel fits decently in his hands. Turning the key in the ignition results in a cough and then the purr of a functional engine. 

He drives the car back through the rows of silently gleaming vehicles, pulling up to the shattered windows of the rental building and climbing back out to retrieve Brendon. 

“I found some gas cans but they’re empty,” Brendon says, edging his way through the door with a frown as Pete steps back inside. He has two gas cans under one arm and he’s shaking another one in Pete’s direction. “And neither of us knows how to siphon gas, shit.”

Pete shifts his feet guiltily.

“…Do you?” Brendon asks, narrowing his eyes suspiciously at Pete.

Pete throws his hands up defensively.

“I’m friends with Gabe Saporta, what do you want from me?” he demands huffily. He ignores the cold pulse of fear in the back of his throat that maybe his friendship should be in the past tense. If anyone could survive an apocalypse it’d be Gabe Saporta. Not that they have any proof this is an apocalypse, of course.

They’ll probably get to Chicago to find Gabe had already made his way there with his entire Cobra crew. Partying it up, Saporta-style. Everything will probably be fine.

He swallows his doubt and grins at Brendon.

“Whatever, find me some clear plastic tubing and some rags. I’ll get your fucking gas.”

+8+

“We have to get supplies, dude,” Brendon says stubbornly.

“I know that,” Pete says impatiently. “It just doesn’t feel right, I dunno.” 

“I’ve literally stood next to you as you shoplifted before, what could possibly be your issue here?” Brendon demands, incensed. Pete shifts uncomfortably and avoids Brendon’s eyes. 

The white front of a Safeway gleams at them from across the street. Its glass doors are shattered and the pavement of its parking lot is buckled but it looks mostly unhurt. The structure looks sound enough, at least. There’s no one in sight but Pete’s almost used to that now. 

“It doesn’t feel fair if they can’t fight back,” he says weakly and frowns when Brendon snorts and climbs out of the car. 

“If you wanna live on a pound of nuts for as long as it’s going to take to sort this shit out, be my guest,” he tells Pete and starts across the street for the Safeway. 

Pete swears and then climbs out after him, locking the doors after a moment of hesitation. Not that he really thinks anyone is going to come along and steal it; he almost wants someone to try, just to prove they aren’t _utterly_ alone. It’s just… he feels like he should. 

Brendon doesn’t say anything when Pete catches up but he does smirk a little bit. Pete punches him in the arm on principle. 

Stepping through the doors is a now-familiar exercise in treading gingerly over shattered glass. Pete hadn’t even noticed how many doors were made of glass until they were all broken. Enough to make it easy to break into places, at least. 

The store beyond is a _ruin_. The ceiling has sagged in alarmingly towards the center of the giant room, thin metal struts buckled and splintered and terrifyingly weak-looking. The only light is through the door and the skylights, the ceiling lights lying where they’d been shaken off their mountings. Wires spark dangerously, the only movement in the gloom. 

They stare for several long moments. Brendon’s pressed against his shoulder again, closer than Pete should be comfortable with. He’s thankful. It’s more than he can really process, this kind of damage. 

“What are we looking for?” he asks, tone false and brightly cheerful. Brendon straightens up with a jerk, hauling in a rough, bracing breath. 

“Right,” he says, and then deflates. Rubs his hands against his thighs nervously. “Nonperishables? I think? And water. Cans? I don’t have a fucking clue, dude.” 

_We’re fucked_ , Pete doesn’t say. Instead he nods decisively and steps further into the flickering dimness of the store. 

They drive away half an hour later, the back loaded with way more cans than they really need for the five hour drive to Vegas. There’s four pallets of water bottles underneath that, and bags under Brendon’s legs full of batteries and flashlights and assorted camping things they’d more or less chosen at random. 

Pete stops at a deserted sporting goods store without a word and climbs out. The door is solid metal but it’s unlocked. The interior is dim and Brendon doesn’t follow him inside. 

He picks up a gun from the display, one marked ‘functional – use with employee supervision’, small enough to be a handgun but still weighty in his hand. He grabs the box of ammunition next to it and leaves as fast as he can. 

Brendon doesn’t say a word as Pete tucks the whole lot into the glove compartment, just climbs in and buckles up as Pete winds their way through the suburban streets.

+8+

The desert’s cracked in half.

They discover the canyon three hours out of the Los Angeles suburbs. It’s sudden, so sudden Pete’s pretty sure he could have driven right off the cliff if he weren’t so on edge already. As it is he brakes hard enough that Brendon topples forward and barely catches himself on the dashboard.

“Fuck,” he hisses and smacks a hand on the wheel.

“Is that… a canyon?” Brendon asks in tones of disbelief like he can’t see the crack in the ground a hundred feet from the bumper of their car. Like it isn’t almost a half-mile across, sheering off the road as neatly as if it’d been cut by a knife.

“Shit,” Pete replies, and climbs out of the car to look.

The canyon is so wide that Pete can’t see either end of it, just a long crevasse in the ground that fades into the distance to his left and right. Pete can’t even get his head around how long it must be, miles and miles and miles long. The edges are smooth. Unnaturally smooth.

When he steps right up to the edge he sees that it’s deep too, easily as deep as the Grand Canyon. Pete’s seen the Grand Canyon before, has stood at the top of the Empire State Building. This is deeper than that. He can make out clouds forming in ragged bands midway down and water at the bottom, seething and white. He steps back from the rim, swallowing against the vertigo.

“There’s no way we’re crossing this,” he tells Brendon unnecessarily. “We’re gonna have to go around.”

Brendon groans and runs a hand through his hair, tugging it even further askew in frustration.

“How far back does this set us?” he asks tersely. Pete can practically see him running the numbers behind his eyes, how close Vegas is, how far this canyon could stretch. The gas in the car versus the number of stops they’ll have to make. They’re not even two hours from Vegas, so close it has to be burning him.

“Depends on how far this canyon goes,” Pete says cautiously. He doesn’t say anything about Spencer, about the lost time. He’s pretty sure it wouldn’t help.

“Fuck,” Brendon hisses. He stands staring at the canyon for a minute, two. Pete watches him, the trembling clench of his fists, the hike of his shoulders up around his ears. His eyes are wide and unblinking.

“Fucking _shit_ ,” he snaps at last, turning away with a sudden violence that startles Pete. He stalks back to the car with jerky footsteps. His hands are still balled into fists and Pete circles him warily. 

Brendon’s fist slams into the frame of the car with a bang.

“We can’t _do_ this!” he shouts at the sky, then spins to face Pete. “We’re fucking musicians, Pete! We don’t know what we’re doing!”

Brendon’s taken two steps when Pete catches up, spins him around and grabs him by the shoulders. Shaking him feels good, like he’s knocking sense into Brendon, like he’s letting out some of his own fear from where it’s raging against the inside of his ribs. He only stops when Brendon clutches him back, hands on his arms clinging so tight his fingers pinch Pete’s skin.

“We can do this!” Pete insists, shouts, right into Brendon’s face. “Bren, we can do this!”

“Pete,” Brendon pants, staring at Pete.

“I can’t do this without you, Bren,” Pete says desperately. His breath is edging towards hyperventilation, harsh ragged pants that don’t feel like they pull in anything but dust. Brendon is frozen in Pete’s hands, expression shock and nothing else. “You have to hold it together, okay? For Spencer and Patrick, right? We gotta hold it together till Vegas, we can do that, okay?”

His voice chokes off into panting. He’s truly hyperventilating now, breath so fast it saws at his lungs. His vision is starting to tunnel into pinprick flashes of the desert and Brendon’s scared face.

“Pete, Pete, calm down,” Brendon says when Pete’s voice breaks. He catches Pete when his legs stop being able to support his weight, dropping with him to kneel on the ground.

There’s a pebble pressing into his left shin, Pete thinks. It’s all he can think, a loop of thought running and running and running. It’s better than the fear.

“You’re right. Pete, you’re right, we can do this,” he becomes aware of Brendon telling him frantically. He must have dropped out for only a few seconds because Brendon’s still white-faced, still trembling. Pete can feel it in the hands pressed to his upper arms. “We’re gonna make it to Vegas, we’re gonna make it there.”

“We are,” Pete croaks out. His throat feels shredded. It almost reminds him of his screaming days. Arma Angelus. Before all this, before even Fall Out Boy. God, he can barely even remember it.

Brendon huffs out a relieved breath and drops back to sit down. Pete follows suit. His legs ache, and the pebble is still under his shin. He pulls it free and throws it away, towards the canyon. It bounces twice before coming to rest.

“We’re a mess, dude,” Brendon says when a couple minutes have passed. His color is almost normal and the smile he offers Pete is pretty convincing. Pete’s pretty sure it’s even mostly real.

“Fuck,” he agrees, rubs at the ache starting up above his eyes before floundering his way to his feet. “We can’t stay here, anyway. Gotta figure out a game plan.”

Brendon follows him up, clumsy on limbs that must ache as much as Pete’s. They’ve gone through the same twenty four hours after all.

“Where to?” Pete asks, fumbling the map out of his pocket and spreading it on the hood of the car. One side is the greater LA area and the other is a map of the Western half of the United States, which he jabs a shaky finger at now. “Looks like the canyon’s running north-south, so pick your poison.”

“North,” Brendon replies after a second of thought. “It’ll probably be hotter down south and we need to conserve gas.”

Pete breathes out and smooths the edge of the map where it’s folded over, already creasing and tearing a little bit. The air judders in his chest, shaking and unpleasant, but his head clears a little more with every exhalation. It helps, and he needs to be clear-headed to drive, and Brendon needs him to be. 

That last thought is what puts his hands into motion, folding up the map and slotting it into his pocket. He turns to Brendon and puts on the best he can do of a grin. 

“North it is. Maybe we’ll make it to Seattle, who knows,” he says and Brendon smiles back. It’s his boardroom smile but Pete doesn’t call him on it. Old habits die hard and Brendon probably needs something to rely on. Some sort of armor. 

The chasm doesn’t visibly narrow for hours and hours, until it gets so dark Pete pulls over by the side of the road and parks. The only upside he can see is that the chasm hadn’t _widened_ either. It’s something at least. 

“One of us should keep watch,” Brendon says quietly, and Pete nods. They’re a mile or so from a cluster of dark, squat buildings but neither of them had mentioned trying to hole up in them. It’s probably not safe. 

“I’ll go first,” Pete says with a grin. “S’not like I sleep anyway.” 

Brendon nods solemnly and climbs into the backseat, curling up with his head pillowed on his arms. They’d forgotten to grab a pillow or blankets and Pete shrugs out of his jacket, tossing it back over Brendon. 

“Thanks,” Brendon mumbles in the dark. He sounds halfway asleep already, slurring and exhausted. 

“Don’t mention it,” Pete says, and settles back in his seat to watch the horizon.


	2. Chapter 2

“Sparkling,” Brendon says abruptly. Pete jumps a little bit. 

Pete’d woken Brendon when it’d finally gotten to be impossible for him to keep his eyes open, climbing back into the backseat and falling asleep with exhausted speed. Brendon had been awake when sunlight had finally forced his eyes back open, staring blankly across the road at the thin shadow marking out the far lip of the canyon. 

He’d been a tiny figure, heels on the edge of the driver’s seat, chin on his knees, hands tucked around his ankles. It had taken saying his name twice to get his attention, and he’d just climbed across the seats into the passenger side without a word and promptly fallen asleep. 

They’d been driving for two or three hours without a sound when Brendon had spoken the first word he’d said all day. Pete hadn’t even known he’d been awake. 

“What?” he asks belatedly. Brendon leans forward and points up a head and a little to the left. 

“There’s something over there that keeps sparkling,” he says. He sounds intrigued. 

It’s better than exhausted resignation and so Pete only hesitates a moment or so.

“Wanna go check it out real fast?” he asks and the smile Brendon turns on him is bright and sincere. Pete’s turning the wheel down the side road that points kind of in the direction of the sparkling thing a minute later, listening to Brendon theorize about what it could be with increasing excitement. 

“I really doubt it’s the pyramid from that one Brendan Frasier movie,” he interjects a few minutes later. “Which was The Scorpion King, by the way.” 

“Like I give a shit,” Brendon says airily, waving that away. “I’m just saying Pete, _diamonds_. There could be _diamonds_ , we could be _rich_.” 

“What would you buy?” Pete asks and sits back to drive quietly as Brendon expands enthusiastically on his plan for just, ‘the most _amazing_ house, oh my god’ complete with a little house for his dogs and a music room that sounded more like a professional recording studio crossed with an instrument store than anything else. They both ignore the blasted desert around them, the fact there might not be any recording studios left. 

There might not be anyone left to make instruments, Pete carefully doesn’t think, and he regulates his breathing with ruthless efficiency. 

The closer they get the more obvious it is that what they’re looking at isn’t anything like diamonds. It looks like a town except every now and then, when they’re going around a bend, the whole thing lights up like a skyscraper in the sunshine. 

“I think it’s a town?” Pete says uncertainly. Brendon leans forward to stare out the windshield. 

“Looks like it,” he replies. He stays that way, hands on the dashboard, until they’ve pulled up parallel to the sign advertising the name of the town. There’s something about it, some sheen or glint to the shiny paint that looks unnatural. Pete pauses for a moment, unwilling to step out of the car. 

There’s a sound coming through the cracked window, faint but audible now that the engine has died. A whistling, low sound. It reminds Pete a little bit of blowing across the top of the bottle, a humming noise right on the edge of disappearing into the sound of the wind. 

“That tree is _glittering_ ,” Brendon says, sounding almost scandalized, and hops right out of the car door like he isn’t concerned at all with the strangeness of this place. Pete scrambles after him, almost tripping over his feet in the hurry. He stumbles up to where Brendon’s closely examining the foliage of a stunted, glittering tree. The light is fracturing around the translucent green leaves, reflecting in angular glints onto Brendon’s hovering fingertips. 

“Is this _glass_?” Brendon asks incredulously, and pokes at a leaf.

It shatters as soon as Brendon’s finger touches it with a sound like a bell, pealing and strong. Pete jumps about a foot in the air and they both freeze, listening closely. There’s nothing but the same high-pitched whistling. The sound of the wind flowing around and over glass. It makes Pete’s skin crawl.

“I think this whole place is made of glass,” Brendon says, sounding awed. 

“This is fucking spooky,” Pete says, shivering. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I wanna look around just a little,” Brendon says, bouncing happily. “Isn’t it cool?”

Pete pauses, glances around at the silently glittering grass, the razors masquerading as leaves. The houses that shine when the light hits them right, now that he knows that’s what he’s looking at. Then he looks at the brightness that’s bloomed in Brendon's face and grits his teeth. He can’t ruin that. 

“For a bit,” he agrees grudgingly. “We have to keep moving.” 

The town doesn’t get easier to handle with time. Things keep moving out of the corners of his eyes, infinitesimal movements that turn out to be nothing but tricks of light shining on glass. He’s ready to punch a wall with pure tension, despite how bad of an idea he knows that is. He wants desperately to get back on the road, back out of this shining, translucent facsimile of a town.

Walking is difficult, when the grass is razor-sharp and the carpet crunches dangerously underfoot. Pete steps gingerly and tries not to think about all the tiny knife-like fragments of glass embedding themselves in the soles of his shoes. 

Brendon doesn’t notice, too busy poking at glass vegetation and the perfect glass imitations of curtains, food, the water frozen mid-spray from the fountain in the center of town.

“Brendon I swear to god, if we don’t get out of here now I am going to jump out of my fucking skin,” Pete finally says. Brendon turns to stare at him, expression shocked.

They’re standing in the middle of a clothing store and they’ve shattered so many filament-thin sheets of glass that the glass carpet looks like it’s growing teeth. Every single one had sounded like a bell, thin and clear and unmistakable, every one ratcheting up the tension in Pete’s shoulders until he’s ready to scream.

“Sure, man,” Brendon says cautiously, and follows Pete carefully through the razor carpet and out the door. It’s easier to breathe in the sunshine, Pete finds. The wind is still whistling but that’s somehow better than the glittering silence. 

The car is just down the road and Pete jogs to it, climbs in and waits impatiently as Brendon climbs in after him. He doesn’t wait for Brendon to pull his seatbelt across, just peels out from the curb and accelerates past the shining walls. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Brendon offers when there’s a mile between their car and the dazzling town on the horizon. Pete shrugs and shuffles his hands awkwardly on the horizon. 

“It’s just,” Pete says, and then stops in frustration. It’s hard to articulate, is what it is, especially frustrating because Pete’s _always_ had words. “It’s not right,” he decides is close enough. “It wasn’t right.” 

Brendon’s quiet for a while. 

“Okay,” he agrees at last and doesn’t say anything else.

+8+

Pete pulls to a stop when the sun is just starting to descend from the apex of the sky, stepping out and stretching out his spine. Brendon topples out after him, blinking owlishly and clutching a package of banana chips to his chest.

There’s a storm brewing on the horizon that Pete’s keeping a lazy eye on. It’s a few miles away still, they probably have hours until it hits. There’s a hum he thinks might be thunder in the air.

“Lunch break,” Pete declares grandly and leans back into the car to shuffle through the mess of supplies in the back of it.

Brendon strips down to his boxers as soon as he’s finished off his bag of banana chips, lying out in the sunshine with a little smile on his face and slapping away the occasional bug. Pete sits down next to him and makes his way methodically through a pack of crackers and a Capri Sun. It occurs to him that his diet during the apocalypse hasn’t changed markedly from what it was before. 

He snorts and Brendon doesn’t bother asking him what he was thinking about. 

The storm clouds are approaching fast and low to the ground, faster than Pete had expected. They’re probably going to have to sleep in the car, though the rain would be a nice change. He idly considers setting up some bowl or something to catch the water, slaps a buzzing insect away from his face and wonders if they could trust the rain.

The insect buzzes back into his face. It’s big and obnoxious and he growls, slapping it to the ground and grinding it to death with his heel.

“Fucking bugs,” he mutters lazily to Brendon. Brendon frowns.

“Weird, the bugs usually don’t get so big in the desert,” he mutters. There’s a couple of the same bugs buzzing around their little impromptu camp and he leans forward to stare at them. Pete discounts him after a second and pokes at the dirt with his straw. He writes his name in the dust with the tip, and then Brendon’s, and then Patrick’s. He scuffs them away after staring for a moment and doodles aimless abstract shapes.

Brendon slaps at the air suddenly, knocking another buzzing insect down. He picks it up and Pete grimaces. Fuck bugs, seriously.

Brendon examines it for a beat, tilting it in the cradle of his palm so it catches the sun.

“Crap,” Brendon huffs and Pete looks over, startled. Brendon’s still staring at the wiggling insect in the palm of his hand but his expression is horror now and Pete feels fear start to percolate in the bottom of his lungs in a prickling rush.

“What’s-,” Pete begins and then Brendon is throwing the bug as far away from himself as he can. He’s on his feet and has a hand in Pete’s collar a second later and is hauling him up as well.

“Go, Pete, go!” he shouts, shoving at him, “That’s a fucking locust, get in the fucking car, go!”

The low hum that Pete had thought was thunder resolves itself into a hissing buzz and Pete understands in a lightning burst of fear.

 _Locusts_.

The cloud in the horizon, it isn't a storm. 

It's a swarm, a couple of miles high and wide enough to fill half the horizon. Pete’s seen small ones before – nature documentaries late at night, exposés on the Dust Bowl, something about the Twelve Plagues of Egypt, _they’ll eat the clothes right off of your body_ – and he’s seen the damage they can do. This swarm dwarfs those, by a margin that had fear pounding through Pete’s gut. He’s bolting for the car in moments with Brendon at his heels.

He leaves the pile of food, the trash in the dirt and Brendon’s clothes in a heap on the brush. They’ve got supplies in the car. He doesn’t want to know what _these_ bugs can do as whatever nightmarish thing the apocalypse has twisted them into. Eat the metal off the fucking car, possibly.

“Fuck, can we outrun them?” he gasps out when Brendon’s in the seat next to him.

He doesn’t wait for a response, doesn’t even really wait for Brendon to get the door closed before he’s reversing onto the road and throwing the car back into gear. He leaves smudges of rubber on the road when he slams the pedal to the floor. The cloud looms behind them, gaining ground too fast, too fast.

“Fucking shit, Pete,” Brendon chokes out when he finally gets the door to latch, hands over his mouth. He’s missing his shirt and his pants are half undone and he looks like he’s about to pass out. Pete reaches over with one hand and fists it in his hair, pulling hard. It’s not safe but nothing is and he needs it, they both need it.

It’s not tender, it’s not comfort. Brendon leans into it anyway, choking out a whining noise of hurt and relief.

He’s clutching at the dashboard with both hands, staring at the swarm in the rearview mirror. It’s dark and huge, so big it blacks out the horizon in the rear window. It doesn’t look a thing like a cloud now, too amorphous and undefined, moving too fast and with too much purpose. Pete fancies he can see individual wing cases catch the light in cheerful glints before he forces himself to focus on the road ahead.

They drive for a minute, then another, then another. 

The distance the swarm is gaining slows, their approach less rapid. It’s not slow enough, not nearly. Pete wonders what it’s going to come down to in the end. Their tank of gas versus the swarm’s persistence? They won’t get far on foot. Maybe half a mile before the swarm caught up.

He chances a glance at Brendon, curled up in the passenger seat. He’s got his head leaned against the center console now, where Pete can keep a hand on him more easily. He’s silent, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, but Pete can feel him shaking.

Pete can sense the gun in the glove compartment like it’s pressing against his consciousness.

It won’t do anything against a swarm of locusts but it might save Brendon. Might save him the kind of death that locusts would be, suffocation or... It would be kinder, probably. Pete wonders if he could do it, if he could make himself to it save him from that kind of painful death. He knows, in the back of his mind, that he could. He feels ancient.

He returns his eyes to the road and tightens his grip on Brendon’s hair. Brendon hisses but butts his head against Pete’s hand.

Pete doesn’t get bored, not exactly, but the fear fades into a sort of sick trance, terror and resignation and cold anger flicking through him by turns. His world becomes the mechanical motion of his hand on the wheel, the front windshield and the cars in front of them, the back window and the thick black swarm. Brendon’s head under his fingertips is the only thing that feels real, blood-hot and soft. 

They drive for an hour and then another before Pete notices the swarm slipping back in the mirror. He shakes Brendon’s head a little to get his attention.

“Is it falling back?” he asks, his voice desperate and cracking. Brendon scrambles up, Pete’s hand slipping away. He rolls down the window, leaning out for a long moment.

“I think it is,” Brendon says when he slips back in and rolls the window up against the dust and wind. He sounds shocked, like he’d been as sure as Pete had been that they’d lose this race. “It looks farther back than before?”

“Shit,” Pete says and hunches over the wheel. They’ve got a third of a tank and a single gas can in the back, and the road ahead of them only has a few cars. Maybe… Maybe they actually _could_ make it.

It’s getting dark when Pete finally decides that they’re going to make it. It’s not a relief, not like he’d thought it’d be. He feels sick instead, sick at the thought of how close they’d come to dying. Sick at the thought of what he’d been prepared to do to save Brendon, even if he’s still sure it would be the right choice to make.

Brendon notices the same a while later, when the car finally beeps to tell them they’re almost out of gas. He leans out the window again and notes what Pete had before, that the swarm is just a smudge low on the horizon silhouetted against the last of the sun. It’s moving now off to the west.

“It’s leaving,” he says, breaking the silence, and Pete exhales.

Evening darkness makes it hard to pull off to the side of the road with any finesse. Pete doesn’t even bother, doesn’t care about the slight skid and the spray of gravel into the night. They’re safe. They’re not going to die in a swarm of locusts. Not going to suffocate under the buzzing weight, not going to be torn apart by a hundred million starving mouths. Fuck, Pete is going to vomit.

He stumbles out of the door and trips to his hands and knees, heaves silently just twice. Nothing comes up and he wipes his mouth compulsively. When he gets to his feet Brendon is kneeling on the hood of the car, squinting out into the dimness.

“We’re safe, Christ,” Brendon says, slides back to the ground and turns back to Pete. He’s smiling, relieved and sweet, and Pete snaps.

He’s not sure what he’s doing until he’s slammed Brendon against the hood of the car, biting a kiss onto his mouth so hard he can taste blood. It’s fiercely good, a brilliant flare of pleasure behind his eyelids before he comes to his senses.

He pulls back and steps away, mouth already shaping an apology when Brendon hisses out a breath and tackles him right back. They hit the dirt hard, a thud that shudders painfully through Pete’s frame before they’re rolling across the ground. It’s almost a fight, a trading of snarling open-mouthed kisses that are more teeth and tongue than lips, more bite and shared air than tenderness.

It hurts, and it’s what Pete needs.

“This is such-,” Pete pants out when they finally roll mostly to a stop, interrupts himself to pull Brendon’s head back by the hair and lick a long stripe up his neck. “-fucking, a cliché,” he finishes when he finally lets go.

“Fuck that,” Brendon tells him on the tail of a moan. It tilts his head back again, exposes the white skin of his throat in the fluorescent glare of the headlights. Pete has to bite down on the curve of Brendon’s neck. Brendon hisses and bucks under him. His skin tastes of salt and dust and human musk and Pete moans at it, at the pure goodness of human touch.

There’s a dark mark forming on Brendon’s skin when Pete pulls away and Pete growls, presses his tongue against it until Brendon bucks again.

“I want,” he grits out, doesn’t bother to finish the sentence. Brendon knows.

“Good,” Brendon pants out, pawing at Pete’s shirt. “Good, I need, _Pete_ -” His words break off into another moan when Pete bites down again. It goes straight through Pete, a bolt of pleasure right down his spine.

“Get that off, get it _off_ ,” he says and yanks at Brendon’s partially undone pants. There’s desperation and fear and need, so much need roiling in the pit of his stomach. He’s hard and aching and he’s almost certain if he stops he’s going to cry.

Everything’s so fucked up, everything’s wrong and sick and different but he’s got Brendon and he needs to _know_ that. He needs skin under his hands, needs and needs and needs.

“You first,” Brendon bites back but he’s arching and twisting in an effort to pull his pants down his hips. Pete follows suit, pulling his shirt off so fast he nearly hits himself in the face. It’s comical, he’d laugh if he could but nothing is funny right now. Instead he throws himself back into the kiss, biting down on Brendon’s bottom lip and tugging until Brendon cries out and hauls his head back by the hair.

“Hurts, you asshole,” he pants out and rolls them over to sit on him. Suddenly there’s cold dirt pressing into Pete’s naked back, solid and rough. He arches against it, shaking at the sensation of gravel against his skin. It’s grounding, and Brendon is hot and heavy on top of him.

He can see them, can imagine it, two grown men rolling over each other in the dirt in the headlights of the car. Almost violent enough to be a fistfight but too desperate to go that far. Desert and ruin all around them for miles and miles. A mess of saliva and skin and a little bit of blood. It sticks in him, that this is what he has. All he has left.

“Sorry, sorry,” he sobs out, rolling his hips up against Brendon’s ass. It feels so good and he does it again, moaning. He can feel Brendon’s dick against his thigh, hard and hot, and he presses against it as best he can.

Brendon moans above him and drops to his elbows to kiss him, a softer press that still has enough force behind it that Pete’s pretty sure he’s leaving bruises. He rolls his hips back against Pete’s dick, an insistent rhythm that builds until he’s panting out little whining noises with every breath. Pete’s no better, a moaning mess under Brendon, all he can do a hand on Brendon’s ass urging him faster and harder.

In the end it’s Brendon threading a hand through his hair that undoes him. It’s gentle, so gentle and unexpected and he’s arching up with a low shout and coming all over himself.

“Did you just, Pete,” Brendon says breathlessly above him, and then his head falls forward against Pete’s shoulder and he shakes apart silently.

They lay in the dirt for what feels like hours. Pete rolls them a little, tucks his chin against Brendon’s shoulder, and clings. The dirt is cold under him and it’s not comfortable, the come drying to his skin and itching uncomfortably. But he needs it, he needs Brendon’s skin on his and something to hold on to.

“I thought we were going to die,” he mumbles an eternity later. He can sort of make out the horizon as a pinkish line in the darkness. The skin under his eyes feels bruised with sleeplessness but his chest feels lighter than it has in a while.

“Me too,” Brendon mumbles back. “But we didn’t.”

Pete falls asleep in the dirt and doesn’t wake up until the sun’s made its way halfway above the horizon. He manages to climb into the backseat before he passes out again. Brendon climbs in after him without comment.

They drive for the afternoon and evening, until it gets dark enough the shadows beside the road are difficult to make out. They’re cars usually, or brush, but every one makes Pete flinch. Eventually they pull to a stop.

Sleep is harder to find than ever, in the dark that they now know hides very real dangers. They try to take it in shifts, Brendon sleeping in the back while Pete stares into the darkness from the front seat, but by dawn it’s the both of them crammed together in the dark, wide-awake and keeping back the panic with quite, inane conversation. Pete doesn’t bring up anything important, not families or friends or anything like that, and Brendon follows suit. They don’t talk about the night before either, though Brendon leans into Pete’s touches more than ever and Pete can’t get himself to stop reaching out.

Pete climbs into the front seat as soon as the sun’s breached the horizon, gunning the engine and pulling back onto the road. He’s not surprised when Brendon climbs over and into the passenger seat a couple minutes later, muttering something about the engine being too loud to sleep.

They reach the end of the canyon abruptly, half a day of driving later. It narrows in the space of a mile or two, from a half-mile wide to barely a yard to less than an inch, and then it closes completely. It’s nowhere near anywhere in particular, though Pete’s increasingly creased map tells him they’re close to Medford, Oregon.

It’s as deep as ever when it closes, Pete notes, getting out of the car to take a look. It looks just like a giant cut in the ground, scalpel-precise and unmistakably shaped. He doesn’t really give it much thought. No point, there won’t be any answers for him.

“Time to turn around and head back,” Brendon says with an exhausted sigh.

Pete’s kind of used to this pace, being awake for days at a time, working on four hours of sleep out of every forty. Brendon isn’t. He’s a pale, dark-eyed shadow, jerking nervously at sudden noises.

“We need gas first. Let’s head to Medford, pick up some supplies, maybe a bed to sleep in,” Pete bargains. He tries on a cheerful grin, likes the way it almost settles right on his face. He’s maybe kind of gaining his footing, a little bit. He knows not to trust it but he’ll take any advantage he can get.

Brendon looks down at his feet for several long moments. He’s weighing Las Vegas versus their chances without the supply stop, Pete knows. Their gas tank versus Spencer. Pete also knows the supplies are going to win out so he waits patiently.

“Yeah, okay,” Brendon says at last and climbs back into the car. He curls up in the passenger seat and stares back at the end of the canyon until they can’t see it anymore.

+8+

Medford is perfectly preserved and Pete’s pretty sure that’s a bad sign.

Brendon doesn’t perk up much when they reach town, staring blankly out the window and grunting noncommittally when Pete asks him where they should stop. Pete watches him nervously out of the corners of his eyes and pulls up in front of a motel. A shitty one, old enough to have physical keys. He doesn’t know if the electricity is working here or not and doesn’t want to leave it to chance. 

“I need to get gas,” Pete says into the silence. 

“I’ll help,” Brendon says, but he doesn’t look up from his knees until he’s climbing out of the car. He doesn’t look at Pete then either, just looks up and down the abandoned streets in the warm afternoon sun. They’re deserted and pristine. 

“Let’s go check out the hotel first,” Pete says at last. Brendon nods and shakes himself, walking around to the back of the car. 

Pete sneaks into the office for the motel and swipes the first key he lays hands on, moving quietly just in case they’re not as alone as he thinks they are. He tosses it to Brendon to check out the room and starts to unload supplies, shifting a little food and water into backpacks just in case. They’re reassuringly heavy when he carries them into the room. 

He’s just arranging them by the door when something falls in the next room with a crash. 

“Pete?” Brendon calls a beat later from the bedroom. His voice sounds choked up and wrong and Pete sprints for the door, rounding it at a skid, clinging to the wall to keep upright. 

Ash and soot come away on his palm when he gets his balance. Brendon is staring at the wall where his hand had been and Pete turns to look. 

The silhouette is clean, surrounded by blackened, curling wallpaper. A person, maybe six feet tall. The detail is incredible, the edges clean except where Pete’s hand had blurred it. Pete can make out the trailing fold of a sleeve in the crisp line of soot. One hand is thrown out to the side, one tucked in like they had been turning, away from… 

Pete turns to look at what the person had been turning away from, and sees the window. It’s clean, if dusty. Sunlight sparkles through it, suddenly ominous. 

“Let’s find a different room,” Brendon says quietly. “Without windows.” 

“Sounds great!” Pete says, tone chipper, turning back to look at the ashy silhouette on the wall. He can make out individual fingers, flared wide like they could block what had done this. 

It hadn’t worked, obviously, and Pete turns away to follow Brendon out of the room. He kind of expects to feel watched, some sort of horror movie logic at work, but he feels nothing at all except the weight of the image of the outstretched hand in the back of his head. Once upon a time it would have been crippling horror, but not anymore. The end of the world changes your perspective, he guesses. 

They have to break into three different rooms to find one without an ashy silhouette painted on at least one wall. The second one had two; a tall, broad figure cradling a figure too small to be anything but a child. Pete had been checking that one, had hustled Brendon by it without letting him inside and locked the door behind him. 

The first one they get to with no ash on the walls – and how strange, that the destruction had been so clearly targeted – Brendon gets to work dragging the bed out of the bedroom and into the windowless anteroom, blocking off the bathroom in the process. He shrugs when Pete points it out, reminding him that they can just use one of the other thousands of deserted bathrooms in the city. He laughs like he thinks he’d made a joke. 

Pete doesn’t think it’s very funny but he shrugs and tosses the backpacks onto the lopsided bed anyway. There’s just the one, a Queen. He doesn’t mention that either. 

“Gas now, and maybe food?” he says, and Brendon follows him out. They leave the door unlocked and the curtains drawn. 

Pete drives them to the first supermarket he can see and kicks Brendon towards the building itself, telling him to pick up whatever he thinks they need, and some blankets or something. Brendon grumbles a little bit as he goes and Pete is relieved to see the uncomplicated expression. 

He smiles a little bit as he pulls out his sections of tubing and his rags, getting to work almost cheerfully. The gas cans are almost out and their tank itself could use a little topping up. 

Brendon has four bags of cans and packages when he comes back, packed tightly together in heavy-duty reusable bags. He’s got a blanket draped over his head too, a fluffy fleece with Barbie smiling inanely from it. He grins madly when Pete’s eyebrows rise instinctually as he takes it in. 

“Nice blanket,” Pete says, and Brendon sketches out a clumsy bow. 

“Doesn’t it suit me?” he asks airily and heaves half the bags into Pete’s arms.

They leave the car loaded when they get back to the hotel, dusk falling on them hard and fast. Brendon brings in his blanket, obnoxiously pink and soft, and Pete brings the gun. He leaves it on the bedside table and carefully doesn’t look at it as he goes and locks the door. Brendon’s under the covers when he turns back around from that, chin snuggled into the fleece and shit-eating grin not hidden at all. 

“Cute,” Pete says, and then launches himself on top of Brendon. They roll for a few moments, fighting and slapping at each other. Their laughter is insanely loud in the silence and it trails off almost as soon as it starts. The silence is more comfortable. 

Brendon kisses him on the corner of the mouth, lightning-fast and dry, and then turns over. Pete lets him go. They lay silently in the darkness, stiff and uncertain, until Pete reaches out and lays his fingers on Brendon’s hip. Brendon sighs and relaxes, falls asleep in the space between one breath and the next. 

He’s awake long after Brendon falls asleep, staring at the dim light on the ceiling. He fades into sleep eventually, into dreams feverishly bright and not quite restful.

+8+

They leave early, Pete plotting the route on their ragged map in careful pencil while Brendon throws together something resembling breakfast. The edges of the paper are worried and distressed now, paper fibers lose and soft against his fingertips. Pete fidgets with them and takes the sandwich Brendon hands him without looking.

It’s peanut butter and jelly and squished, stale bread, maybe the first he’s had in years. He eats it slowly, eyes on the map but unfocused. Brendon leans against his back when he’s finished packing their bags back up, running his Barbie blanket through his fingers quietly. 

“S’get a move on,” Pete says when the last bit of crust has been stuffed into his mouth. Brendon bounces to his feet, tossing his blanket around his shoulders and throwing Pete’s backpack to him. 

“We should try the radio,” he says when they’ve closed the hotel door behind them. Pete leaves the key in the door, little red plastic tab dangling and tossing in the wind. It’s a signal, kind of. _People had been here_. Just in case anyone else came through. 

“Think there’ll be anything?” he asks idly. Brendon shrugs. 

“Worth a try, right?” he says philosophically and tosses his backpack in the backseat. 

They’re on the road out of Medford, heading north at last, when Brendon reaches out hesitantly and presses the ‘power’ button on the radio. The blast of static that fills the car has both of them flinching and reaching for the volume knob at the same time, swerving the car towards the shoulder of the road for a moment. 

The static abruptly dials back into silence and Pete pulls them more or less into the right lane, breathing hard. 

“Jesus _christ_ ,” he hisses out, and then Brendon’s laughing at him, pointing and nearly toppling out of his seat and into the footwell. Pete resentfully considers braking a little bit just to help it along but decides regretfully it would be a little too childish even for him. 

“Your face!” Brendon chokes out between giggling fits. Pete huffs. 

“Prick,” he mutters. Brendon pats him consoling on the shoulder and turns the volume back up to audible. It’s still static, just white noise, not even a hint of anything else. 

It stays the same no matter what frequency Brendon dials it to. Just different tones of static and white noise. He runs out of A.M. frequencies in a few minutes and flips over to F.M. to start all over again. There’s nothing there either and when he’s finally gone through every one his hand falls back into his lap limply. 

“Nothing out there,” he says at last. His voice is resigned, like he hadn’t really been expecting any different. 

Pete tries desperately to think of something he can offer to make up for it. Not that anything really would, he knows, but… something to make it easier to bear. 

“Do we have any CDs? Check the glove compartment,” he says at last. Dutifully Brendon pops it open and rifles through it, carefully setting the gun on the console beside him before returning to pawing through the mess of papers and registrations in it. 

Pete smiles briefly, remembering the end of the world at least meant he’d never have to deal with patronizing cops asking for his registration ever again. 

“Looks like we got a choice between Shania Twain and Kelly Clarkson,” Brendon offers, vaguely muffled still by the way his face is still practically shoved into the mess. 

“Fuck, Kelly Clarkson, obviously,” Pete says instantly. “Like it’s even a question.” 

Brendon pulls his head up and looks at Pete very seriously. 

“You’re a good man, Wentz,” he says solemnly and pops the CD into the player. A modicum of fidgeting later the strains of My Life Would Suck Without You spill from the speakers. 

Brendon sings along with so much animation he falls into the footwell halfway through the song. Pete laughs at him for a whole mile, at the way Brendon doesn’t even bother to climb back out, belting the rest of the song with slightly constrained but no less enthusiastic hand motions.

+8+

When Pete first sees them he thinks they’re mirages, faint blue ripples in the air barely visible in the sunlight, remarkable only because they’re moving.

He tells himself he’s seeing things and focuses on the road, on maneuvering around the scattered cars left abandoned in their lanes. It’s a delicate obstacle course, and for a while he can distract himself from the vast transparent blue shapes on the horizon with it. 

It’s Brendon, huffing out a surprised sound and craning to see through the windshield that convinces Pete he’s not just hallucinating. 

“Pete, are you seeing this?” he asks softly. In answer Pete pulls the vehicle to a stop, finally allowing himself to look. 

What he thought had been shapeless mirages are instead giants, translucent in the sunshine and barely visible as a tint against the air. Three of them in deep royal blue, arms thin and curving, legs thick and cylindrical. Pete rolls down his window and stares, up and up and almost into the sun. He can barely see the top of them, the vague bluish shape that would be their heads. They’re tall enough it’s wreathed in clouds. 

“Yeah,” Pete replies belatedly, breathless. 

Brendon’s leaning out his own window, staring up at the trio of figures. They must be miles off, Pete can barely see their feet through the waver of heat waves. They’re just… walking. Crossing the wide desert with slow, sedate grace. The length of their legs means they cross incredible distances with every step, even though each one takes what feels like forever to complete.

“We should keep going,” Pete says eventually. He can barely pry his eyes away from the giant figures but he slips back down through the window and into the driver’s seat reluctantly. He can still make out the legs, thick and translucent blue, and a bit of their torsos.

Brendon slips back into his seat a second later, though he cranes out his window to stare more as Pete starts the car again and puts them into gear.

The legs thicken as they drive closer, until they’re close enough to make out the roar of wind generated with every step the giants take. It’s soft from so far away, but still awe-inspiring. 

They pass the figures from behind, Brendon craning out the window and Pete having to work to keep even a minimum of attention on the road. They fade with the gathering dark, their edges harder and harder to make out in the dusk. The roaring of wind gets fainter and fainter until even Brendon has to give up and roll up the window. 

They stop for the night by the side of the road, curled up in their respective seats, staring up at the starry sky. There’s no trace of the giants now but Pete can still see them as they would be, tall enough to brush up against the stars. 

“That was-,” Brendon finally speaks up, cuts himself off with a helpless gesture. Pete nods. 

Brendon falls asleep without another word. Pete stays up to keep watch, eyes on the dark. It doesn’t feel so ominous tonight.

+8+

“Almost there,” Brendon says into the silence.

They’re an hour from where the map says Las Vegas should be and Brendon has gotten quieter and quieter with every mile. Pete understands even if he doesn’t like it. He just doesn’t know what to do about it.

“I know,” he replies after a beat. Brendon doesn’t say anything else and the silence lapses again.

+8+

The craters start to show up and neither of them notice at first. They probably start smaller but the first Pete actually sees is about a foot wide, a dent in the pavement of the road marked out in cracked asphalt. He doesn’t mention it to Brendon, discounting it as a pothole. It doesn’t look like one but this is the apocalypse. Who knows what potholes look like in the apocalypse.

The next one is a yard wide, right across their lane, and Pete pulls to a stop and stares at it. Brendon speaks up.

“That’s a big pothole,” he says. He sounds perfectly normal, which is how Pete knows he’s scared. They can make out the darkened mass of the Strip ahead of them, and it looks like it’s mostly still standing. There’s a little smoke in the air above it but not enough to be a big fire.

“Yeah,” Pete decides to say and drives around it.

They drive into Las Vegas proper through the sprawling miles of industrial buildings. It's a mess of craters and toppled buildings. There’s no sign of what had created the impacts, just gutted buildings, smoldering fires, and a fine layer of ash covering everything. Pete noses his way through the stalled traffic, silent. 

There are bodies here. 

Mangled, bloating in the relentless sunshine. Some of them half-crushed by fallen debris, some of them dismembered, most of them just… lying there. Not enough to be the whole population but Pete can’t turn around without seeing at least one, haloed in the crusted remains of blood and viscera. He tries desperately not to look too closely. 

Flies cluster against their windshield in vast swarms. It’s the only movement in the whole city, really. 

When they pass the Strip Brendon has to lean out of the door and puke. Half of it is a crater and the rest of it is charred and tumbling down, and the bodies are so thick here it’s all Pete can do to keep the car from driving over one accidentally. When Brendon gets the door open the smell of ash and rotting meat wafts inside. Pete barely swallows down stomach bile.

“Spencer lives in the suburbs,” Brendon mutters when he finally sits back up in his seat and closes the door. Pete nods, swallows again when the smell of vomit presses against the back of his throat, doesn’t say a word.

It gets easier to drive when they get out of the city proper. There are fewer bodies, and the cars are lined up so politely in their driveways. The craters are fewer as well, and smaller.

It doesn’t really help. There’s something about the dusty craters, the charred homes and ruined cars, that Pete can’t make himself look at. The lawns aren’t much better, the grass is already going brown in the heat. There are toys in some of the yards. Little pastel bikes and basketballs and-

Pete keeps his eyes on the road ahead of him and follows Brendon’s muttered directions

The suburbs fade into a horrifying kind of uniformity, carefully edging the car around craters and the rare car, eyes on the pavement and not on the scorched pastels of the houses. Off the lawns as well, Pete confines his eyes to the street signs and the street. The occasional bloated corpse is better than the alternative. 

Brendon’s hand yanking on his arm breaks the monotonous movement of his hands on the wheel. 

“Stop, stop the fucking car Pete, stop-,” Brendon’s hand yanks at Pete’s arm a final time and then he’s opening the door before the car’s even stopped. He stumbles out, across the street. 

There’s another crater, overlapping two properties. Nothing is left of one of the houses but there’s a few walls still standing of the other one. There’s furniture scattered across the brown grass, Pete sees when he scrambles out after Brendon. A bed sans mattress, a couple of decorative end tables. A single window, cracked but still most intact, winks cheerfully in the sun. 

A dog’s body lies on the sidewalk a few feet down, swollen and blackened, breed impossible to recognize. The air smells like rotting meat and dust. Brendon isn’t looking at it, stares at the crater and Pete feels something sick and cold congeal in the pit of his stomach.

“Brendon-,” he starts.

The sound Brendon lets out is tearing, cracking and high-pitched and it doesn’t stop. For a moment Pete thinks he’s crying but then Brendon’s folding over, bracing his hands on his knees. His face is red and his cheeks are wet and he’s laughing. It’s horrifying to watch and worse to hear and Pete pulls him into a hug more to try to stop the sound than any hope of actually comforting him.

“Brendon, Bren,” he chants, pressing a hand to Brendon’s cheek, to his hair, clumsy stroking trying to fix something that isn’t okay, will never be okay. Brendon breaks off for a moment to haul in a jagged breath.

“That’s his, that’s, Spencer, _Spencer_ ,” he says and then he’s crying. It’s as bad as the laughter.

He cries for ten minutes, maybe. At some point his legs give out and Pete has to guide him to sit on the curb. He can’t let go, can’t force himself to stop running his hand through Brendon’s greasy hair. He makes shushing sounds occasionally, something he vaguely remembers his mom doing when he was a kid. Pete’s never been the guy someone went to for comfort. 

Now, he supposes he’s the _only_ guy. He’s still not any good at it. 

Brendon talks a little bit, in between sobs. Nonsense mostly, Spencer’s name mangled out and missing half its consonants, swearing liberal and only recognizable because Pete expects it to come. _Why, why, why_ , constantly and loudly. Hissed at the sidewalk and demanded of the sky. He beats his fists against Pete’s arms once but Pete doesn’t give him any traction and he folds back into the hug with desperately clinging fingers anyway. He wasn’t fighting Pete, not really. 

The crying stops eventually, more or less, down to the occasionally wracking shudder and the slow drip of tears from the point of his chin. Brendon’s cheeks are raw and his eyes are red-rimmed and sore-looking. Pete sops at his face as best he can with a sleeve, knows the dirty, rough material is marginally better than letting the salt dry in the heat. 

“Come on, man,” he manages eventually, urging Brendon to his feet. Nothing good is going to come of staying in the open. It’s probably not doing anything good for Brendon’s sanity either, sitting and staring at the hole where Spencer’s house had been. Probably. God, Pete doesn’t _know_. 

Brendon stands and stares at it anyway for a minute, before he dips suddenly out of Pete’s hold and snags a broken table leg and pitches it at the last window. It shatters insanely loudly in the still air and Pete flinches, grabs Brendon where he’s windmilling wildly to keep his balance. 

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Brendon screams and then sags into Pete, arms swinging at his side. 

He follows Pete docilely when Pete tugs softly on his shoulder. They make it about halfway down the sidewalk back to the car, hobbling together. 

The sound of a door slamming open goes off like a shot. 

“Pete? _Brendon!_ ” someone shouts, right on the heels of the sound. Brendon’s head pops up so fast he almost breaks Pete’s nose, turning desperately to see who called his name. Disbelieving, Pete cranes around as well.

There’s someone tumbling down the stairs to the porch of a house down the street and across the road, the human, living movement almost nauseating after so much constant stillness. He hits the ground running, stopping at the curb with his arms upraised like he’s preaching to an invisible congregation. He’s dusty beyond belief, a bandana across his forehead, long brown hair poking out from underneath, baseball bat in hand, and it’s unmistakably Spencer.

There’s frozen silence for a heartbeat.

Brendon makes a high noise and throws himself across the street.

He tackles Spencer and they topple into the brown grass of the lawn, rolling across the dirt in a puff of dust. They’re yelling, incoherently, ecstatically happy noises. Pete watches them, idly dusting off the back of his pants. He’s grinning so wide it’s almost hurting his cheeks and it feels totally unfamiliar. Something bubbly and warm he recognizes might be happiness presses against his ribs.

Another dude steps cautiously out onto the porch. He’s _big_ , got a baseball bat in hand too and Pete stiffens for a moment. The dude isn’t doing anything though, just staring at the rolling, shouting mess that’s Brendon and Spencer. His expression is perplexed but friendly.

“Hi,” Pete says to him, walking across the street. “I’m Pete. That’s Brendon.”

“Dallon,” the tall dude says slowly, eyeing Pete up and down and then doing a double-take. “You’re that dude from Fall Out Boy. Spencer said he knew you. I kind of didn’t believe him.”

Pete has to laugh because even after the end of the world and the subsequent road trip from hell he’s still the fucking _dude from Fall Out Boy_. Awesome.

“That’s me,” he says, and then he’s interrupted by the distinctive sound of Brendon being noogied. He smiles winningly at Dallon and doesn’t look behind him. “Any chance I can come inside?”

Dallon pauses for a long moment, examining Pete with almost impersonal curiosity. Pete stares back blatantly. 

Dallon’s tall, but he’s also skinny. Not dangerous-looking, not when Pete really takes the opportunity to take it all in. He looks kind of like a scarecrow, kind of like a pretty scene boy. He’s got the hair for it certainly, despite the dust and oil, but there’s something about the way that Dallon’s watching him that speaks to more depth than that. 

Brendon shouts something incoherent and Spencer laughs, deep and sweet. 

“Sure,” Dallon snorts, and holds the door open for Pete.

+8+

Spencer hasn’t changed as much as Pete feels the apocalypse should have changed him. The circles under his eyes are darker and his hair is as greasy as all of theirs are, he sticks to Dallon when he isn’t pressing himself so close to Brendon they seem to be trying to meld into one person. But he still smiles about as much as ever, still has that way of talking with his hands.

He’s still _Spencer_.

They explore the house for a few minutes but there’s nothing much to see but ash-dusted furniture and curtained windows. There’s no one else there and the house isn’t Dallon’s. The pictures on the wall are all of people who look nothing like him. Pete doesn’t ask. There won’t be any answer that’s pleasant.

The group spends the rest of the day in the basement crammed onto a single couch, after the front door has been carefully locked. It’s too hot anywhere else. They tell stories in the dimness, how they survived what had happened.

Brendon tells them about the earthquake. Tells them about the convenience store and the basement and the hours spent holding hands in the dark to make sure they were still there. He sounds unconcerned, unaffected even. Pete feels his knee shaking where it’s pressed into his thigh. Spencer drops a hand across the back of Brendon’s neck in a way that could almost, almost be casual.

“There was this… noise,” Pete explains slowly when it’s his turn. “It just got into my brain, I don’t know. I thought… there was something up on the surface. It felt safe? I just-,” he snorts in frustration and throws out a hand in a gesture of helplessness, “I can’t explain it. I wanted to go up there. Brendon stopped me, probably saved my life to be honest.”

He smirks at Brendon, half fake leer and half genuine gratitude. Brendon returns a tiny, watery smile.

“Happened to me too,” Dallon puts in. He’s on the far end, tucked behind Spencer, long limbs splayed farthest across the floor and the back of the couch. He’s been mostly quiet, obviously knowing he’s the outsider here. Now he meets Pete’s eyes with a crooked grin.

It’s an empty expression. It knows what Pete knows, the sound that had emptied Pete out and filled him up again with itself. The pounding, relentless need to follow it. The visceral false knowledge of safety.

“Spencer saved me too, actually,” he says, breaking eye contact to nudge Spencer’s shoulder. Spencer goes kind of red and ducks his head. “He was with me when the meteors started, we got to know each other pretty well. He punched me in the face when I tried to walk out the door.”

“Sounds like Spencer,” Brendon breaks in with a shit-eating grin.

“Hey!” Spencer says, reaching out to knuckle at the top of Brendon’s head. “Shut your mouth,” he snaps laughingly as Brendon squirms away.

“Meteors?” Pete asks. Spencer freezes, fist still hovering over Brendon’s head.

“You noticed the craters,” Dallon says at last when it becomes obvious no one else is going to start talking. Spencer draws his hands back into his lap and stares down at them.

“Hard to miss,” Brendon replies. He sounds anxious. Pete can’t blame him.

“They started falling probably the same time the earthquake was happening to you guys,” Spencer says unexpectedly. His voice is hoarse and he doesn’t look up from his hands. “It was worse closest to the city but I was out here. There were just these massive rocks, except they were on fire. They had to be the size of a fucking house, _Jesus_.”

He breaks off and Dallon nudges his shoulder with a knuckle.

“They fell for hours,” he continues when Spencer doesn’t. “I got as many people as I could into my basement and I guess Spencer was there. Eventually we stopped hearing them hit, so most of the people left to go see what was going on. Spencer and a couple other people stuck around just to be sure it was over.”

Dallon pauses, rubs his mouth and stares down at the dim shapes of their feet.

“That was when the sound hit. I don’t really remember it.”

Pete knows he’s lying. He doesn’t call him on it. _He_ doesn’t really want to remember it either.

“I managed to stop him, and a couple other people. I had some ear buds on me, I was going drum shopping,” Spencer speaks up unexpectedly. He’s watching his feet too. “I didn’t… I didn’t get all of them.”

Everyone is silent for a very long time. Dallon puts a hand on Spencer’s hair. Brendon leans his head against Spencer’s shoulder. Pete wishes he could do something but he’s frozen, frozen with the horror of what Spencer must have had to do.

He would have to have been faced with a choice. Whether to save this person or that. As many as he could, but not all of them. He must have watched them go stumbling up the stairs knowing they wouldn’t be coming back, not ever, gone or dead or worse.

“Did Brendon tell you about the town we found that’d been turned entirely to glass? Creepiest shit I’ve ever seen,” he pipes up in the smothering silence. Spencer looks at him, abjectly grateful, as Brendon pops up to chatter away about it.


	3. Chapter 3

He gets the first full night’s sleep he’s gotten in days. 

He’d woken every few hours, panting and sick to his stomach, but it’s to four stationary walls and that’s achingly good. When he finally hauls himself down the stairs into the basement there’s a breakfast of canned pasta actually heated on a camp stove. Brendon has a pile of clean but dusty clothing he hands off and they’re all in mostly the right sizes. It’s unbelievable luxurious. 

Pete’s having a hard time concentrating. The curiosity is finally getting the better of him, about who else might have survived Las Vegas. Spencer hasn’t said a word about anyone or anything. He’d know if anyone did but Brendon hasn’t asked when Pete’s been around. He follows that lead, he doesn’t want to go digging up ghosts Brendon’s content to let lie. 

But he had been _friends_ with Ross, before Brendon even. No one’s said a word about him and all the worry is driving Pete a little crazy.

Pete settles into the couch, pressed into Spencer’s side. On his other side there’s about three feet of couch cushion available but Spencer doesn’t say anything or even appear to notice in any way except to pull his arm back up to the top of the couch. _There’s no such thing as personal space in the apocalypse_ , Pete thinks with private irony. He’s just as guilty. There’s something viscerally necessary about body-heat and skin contact now.

“So,” Pete says in an undertone. 

“So,” Spencer echoes. He sounds kind of amused, kind of tired. He’s watching Dallon and Brendon, tucked around a battered acoustic Dallon had pulled out of the attic. They’re muttering to each other and strumming the occasional note, an ode to canned pasta from what Pete can hear.

Pete spends about a second trying to think of a tactful way to ask what he wants to know before he decides that, whatever, the worst that can happen is Spencer punches him. It barely rates on the scale of shitty things that have happened recently. 

“What happened to Ryan?” 

Spencer freezes for a moment, barely a stutter of a pause before he tilts his head and stares up at the ceiling, obviously considering. It’s a toss-up how much he’ll tell Pete. Spencer always was a little cagey about Ryan and probably always will be. Something about being best friends for so long, but possibly also a Ryan thing.

“He’s not dead,” Spencer says at last with a frown. “His house was okay when me and Dallon finally got around to there but there wasn’t anyone home. Took off right after the sound hit, from what I could tell. He took his fucking guitar like an asshole.”

Pete can’t help the snort of laughter and Spencer looks at him sideways with a tiny grin tucked into the corner of his mouth.

“Has Brendon asked about…?” Pete asks delicately. Spencer shrugs, smile evaporating into an uncomfortable frown.

“No. He hasn’t asked about his family either,” he says. He sounds concerned. Pete doesn’t miss the way he glances across the room at Dallon and Brendon. Which of the two is responsible for the guilt that twists at his face for a moment before he looks away, Pete can’t fathom a guess.

“And them?” Pete asks. His tone is weird, he knows, but he’s never been the biggest fan of Brendon’s family. Or really, anyone who’d do that to a kid Brendon’s age.

“Very definitely dead,” Spencer says. He sounds coolly disinterested and the way he turns his head to look back at Pete is classically bitchy Spencer. “Got any more deeply personal questions? Want to know which hand I jack off with?”

The laughter bursts out of Pete and bends him over, distracts Dallon and Brendon from whatever deeply important guitar-related thing they’d been discussing. They look over with weirdly identical frowns and Pete has to wave them away wordlessly before they actually ask what had set him off.

“I’m right-handed,” Spencer tells him dryly and heaves himself to his feet, leaving Pete in a crumpled heap of hysterical laughter. 

He can’t stop for a long time and it’s probably mostly trauma working itself out but still. It feels good.

+8+

He’s halfway through the fourth day of waking up in an actual bed – couch cushions, more honestly, they’ve all stopped sleeping alone and started cramming together on the couch or floor – when he realizes what’s happening.

He’s being distracted, is what, he’s getting turned around by the dull, silent desert heat. The weird sense of belonging that’s the dusty basement and the collection of cans in the corner that they draw from two or three times a day. The deflated couch they sleep on – or try to, Pete still can’t sleep for more than four hours at a time. Singing quietly along to whoever can claim the acoustic first and Spencer tapping out a rhythm with two battered pencils.

It’s like a home, something Pete’s been missing for longer than he can excuse with an apocalypse. And it’s dangerous as hell. He hasn’t thought about Chicago for hours, maybe days, too long by far. 

The fear is instant and paranoid, that he’s forgetting too much. That he’ll lose his mom, his dad, his whole family to the dull repetition of the Vegas days. That Patrick and Andy and Joe will go the same way. Gabe and the Ways too, and everyone that isn’t contained in the four walls of the basement. That he’ll look up someday months from now and not remember why he’d ever wanted to go to Chicago in the first place. 

The need to escape pounds in Pete’s chest. The only thing that stops him from stumbling to his feet and running right out the door is the knowledge that he’ll be leaving behind Brendon, that without any of the other three he’d be totally, utterly alone. 

He spends an hour in the ground-floor living room, staring down the street through the window at the crater where Spencer’s house was. The sun is just passing the highest point in the sky when he finally gets back something like control and goes down into the basement.

Brendon’s perched on the arm of the couch, Spencer leaning against his legs, and they both look up at him expectantly when he clatters down the last few steps. Dallon is nowhere to be seen but that’s okay, maybe things will go better without him. Maybe they won’t. Thinking is difficult, Pete feels like he’s floating just above the roaring, ugly fear in his chest that he’ll be doing this alone.

God, anything but that.

“I’m going to Chicago,” Pete says.

Brendon’s head twists away, almost a flinch. He’s going pale in a rush, fingers clutching at his knees until their knuckles go numb. It cracks through Pete’s chest but he holds back the fear and smiles. 

They’re frozen for a moment, two. Brendon who won’t look at him, Spencer, looking back and forth between them with agonized confusion. He’ll go with Brendon, Pete knows. He can’t even blame him.

“We could come with you.”

It’s Dallon. He’s leaned against the doorframe behind Pete, arms folded and head tilted considering.

“I mean, if you’re cool with it. I don’t have anywhere else I need to be,” he continues, faux-casual like it’s no big deal that he’s offering to tag along on probably the most dangerous thing he could ever do with someone he’s known less than a week. The end of the world does strange things to the definitions of friendship, Pete knows. “Chicago doesn’t sound half bad.”

It occurs to Pete to wonder about Dallon. About who he was before the meteors, who his people were. If he had people. If there was still the _maybe, maybe_ hovering over his head or if he knew for sure he was totally alone. Why he had chosen Spencer and Spencer had chosen him.

“Happy to have you, dude,” Pete says instead of asking.

“We should go with them,” Spencer says quietly to Brendon. It’d be private if it weren’t for the oppressive, eternal silence the apocalypse has brought on. As it is, the words echo in the room with way more weight that they should. It’s a tragic play at secrecy and Pete almost wants to walk away just to give it to them.

Brendon shrugs, doesn’t look up.

“Bren,” Spencer urges, finally reaching out to brush fingertips against Brendon’s shoulder.

Brendon flinches violently, finally looking up at them. His face is lost, eyes blank and far away. 

“We could come along,” he says at last, voice cracking. It sounds sort of like a question, almost like asking for permission. It occurs to Pete that he’d never asked Brendon to come with him to Chicago. He’d always just kind of… assumed. 

“You should,” Pete says, faking cocky. “You’d totally miss me.” 

Brendon smiles. It’s watery and barely there but what there is of it is sincere. 

“Maybe a little,” he says. He’s trying for sarcasm and missing by a mile. Pete courteously doesn’t mention it. 

“Right,” Pete says instead and grins, wide and stupid-happy. 

They watch each other for a long moment, smiling. Pete feels like thick anxiety has lifted a little bit, enough to breathe. 

“Are they always this emotionally constipated?” he hears Dallon ask with interest. 

“You have no idea,” Spencer says, tone despairing. 

Brendon punches him in the shoulder.

+8+

Together they discover they have enough food for two days on the road if they only eat twice a day. It’s not enough, not to be sure they won’t starve somewhere in the ass-end of the Midwest. There’s nothing certain about the route, Spencer and Dallon know nothing about anything farther east than the city limits.

Spencer and Brendon confer quietly for a few minutes and then hand over a list of nearby grocery stores to hit. 

Pete ends up taking Spencer. Brendon had said something about communing with the acoustic one last time and there’d been something manic and scared in his eyes so Pete hadn’t pressed the issue. Dallon had offered to stay behind and keep Brendon company, answered Pete questioning look with a nod. 

Pete decides he trusts Dallon to keep Brendon from doing something truly stupid and stops listening when Brendon digresses into a monologue about how much he misses his old guitars. Absently he plots how he’s going to pack the back of the car around their two newest passengers. It put them out the backseat, even taking the middle seat into account. 

Spencer’s a quiet car mate, contributing a pile of battered blink-182 CDs to the sad little stack scattered on the passenger-side floor. He snorts at the Shania Twain, tossing it out into the brown lawn when Pete shrugs. Pete puts in Enema and hums along, smiling a little bit at the clearly practiced beat Spencer taps out on his knees. 

The first supermarket they stop at is a crater in the ground surrounded by overturned, twisted hulks of wrecked cars. Pete doesn’t even bother slowing down, following Spencer’s quiet directions around the corner and past it. 

The second is a charred wreck, a husk of four walls and drooping steel beams. Pete stops for a moment, just to be sure if there’s anything they can salvage, but there’s absolutely nothing but ash, cinders, and singed plasterboard. He pulls away eventually to the sound of Spencer beating out perfect time to All the Small Things. 

The irony doesn’t escape Pete. 

There’s a body lying across the doorway of the third supermarket they stop at, the only one so far that has any likelihood of yielding useable supplies. 

It’s facedown, a piece of the support beam to the ceiling lodged nearly vertically through its stomach and spine. Blood, dried and brown, halos it on the concrete in vast arching smears where the person had apparently thrashed for several moments. They’re blonde, still, despite the blackening, green-purple skin. The color contrast almost makes Pete want to laugh. 

For a long, dreamy moment Pete thinks the hair is moving, Medusa-like, coiling and twitching. Then he looks closer and no, it’s not that at all. The strands are twitching and moving because there are maggots writhing in its long hair.

He pukes against the side of the building, the smell of it making the tang of rotting meat in the air ten times worse. Spencer stays by his side grimly, hands on his shoulder and back keeping him from falling into the pool of vomit. He doesn’t say a word when Pete’s finally done, wiping his mouth and spitting compulsively to get the taste out. Just offers his water bottle to clean with and takes Pete’s hand like they’re little kids. 

They step together over the corpse and into the warm, moist darkness of the store. 

“Water first,” is the only thing Spencer says. Pete nods and follows him docilely, focusing on Spencer’s warm, slightly damp hand in his and not on the pervasive taste of rotting food in the air. He’s got drummer’s callouses, like Andy and Patrick. He doesn’t let go until they find the drinks section.

The freezers of drinks reek of spoiled milk and warm juice when Spencer pulls them open. There are water bottles though, liters and gallons as well, sparkling and clear and infinitely valuable. Spencer starts pulling them out one after another and handing them across to Pete to pile on the ground. 

“How much do you think?” he asks when they have a sizeable pile. He sounds nasal with the effort of not breathing through his nose. Pete shrugs. 

“I was thinking we should pick up some water purifiers too,” he offers. “Maybe some other stuff? We don’t know what it’s like out there.” 

“Good plan,” Spencer agrees. 

They decide on three bag-loads of water and Spencer takes them without a word, pointing Pete towards the canned goods section. 

“I’ll take these out,” he says. Pete doesn’t thank him for it, for trying to shield him from the rotting thing in the doorway. Neither of them acknowledge it. It’s not _worth_ acknowledging, would only end in stumbling words and inadequate gestures. 

Pete loads up cans of vegetables with expiration dates months away, shitty pre-cooked pastas, boxes of crackers. A few bags of rice and a few of beans. He tosses in a bottle of mixed spices. He doesn’t know what they’ll need, drives himself a little crazy standing in the soup aisle wondering what would keep and what would have to be left behind later. 

Spencer finds him there, a can of chicken noodle in one hand and a can of alphabet soup in the other. He drops both of them when Spencer’s hand touches his shoulder, shuddering and breathing out. 

“I’m fine,” he says into Spencer’s expectant silence. 

Spencer still doesn’t answer and Pete turns his head to look at him. His spine feels rusty and it’s almost too much effort. 

He’s watching Pete with something sad and tired in his eyes, something hurting and resigned and exhausted. Pete remembers thinking Spencer hadn’t changed, back at the house, just days ago. He can’t believe it anymore, can’t believe how much older Spencer looks. Ancient and stoic and infinitely terrible to look at. 

Pete remembers the whole in the ground where Spencer’s house should be. Where Spencer’s family should be. Where maybe, maybe, Spencer thinks _he_ should be. 

“I think we’re all due at least one massive freak-out,” Spencer says, crooking a smile like he expects Pete to laugh. The smile doesn’t reach above his mouth, doesn’t do a thing to alleviate the look in his eyes. 

“Probably,” Pete agrees quietly and bends down to gather up his cans. Spencer helps, takes half the bags from his hands and guides him back to the door. Their wrists brush together as they go and Pete doesn’t even pretend to think it’s a coincidence. 

They step over the corpse and its writhing hair with eyes fixed firmly ahead and Pete hauls the smell of meat and ash into his lungs gratefully. It’s better than the rotten milk and trapped dampness of the interior. He doesn’t look back at the building, not even when all the bags are loaded up and Spencer is standing by the passenger-side door expectantly. 

“Are we gonna talk about that?” he says when they’re buckled into their respective seats. Spencer doesn’t even glance his way, staring out the windshield and down the street. 

“About what?” Spencer says and Pete nods, turning up the volume of the stereo and pulling out into the street. 

Dallon and Brendon welcome them home with piles of clothes they tell Pete they’d ‘rescued’ from nearby houses. Brendon seems entirely convinced of the heroism of his rescue mission and Dallon is smiling crookedly over his shoulder. They’re both wearing sundresses over their jeans, bright and floral in the dim house. Brendon has a pair of massive sunglasses perched at the end of his nose, over his own glasses. 

He’s grinning wide and uncomplicated, and Pete feels a sharp pang low in his gut. 

Pete steals one of the dresses and yanks it over his head, flouncing a little bit and fluffing his skirt when he’s done. The cloth smells vaguely perfumed, like it’d been packed away with flowers or something. Spencer refuses to put one on at first until Brendon and Dallon tackle him and wrestle a baggy green one over his tee shirt. He leaves it on when they let him up, pink around the edges and no evidence of the tired sadness Pete had seen in his smile. 

The material is cool and feels nice. Pete smooths it unconsciously as he helps them load the car with the last of their supplies, running the material through his fingers until he forgets he’s wearing it. 

He only remembers when he’s sitting on the floor next to the pile of couch cushions that’ve come to mean ‘bed’. Dallon is upstairs, watching the street from the front room in a lax show at vigilance. Spencer and Brendon are spooned together under a thin sheet, Brendon’s face smushed into the back of Spencer’s neck, snuffling occasionally. 

The bright floral patterns of the dresses are still so jarring in the gloom and Pete picks at his hem again. He’s not sure why his heart is beating so fast, why he has to work so hard to keep his breathing even. He’s not feeling much of anything at all. 

He doesn’t sleep, until Dallon ambles down the stairs. He cocks his head questioningly when he sees Pete awake. 

“I’ll take next watch,” Pete says instead of trying to answer. Dallon shrugs and wades into the pile of cushions, shoving the other two around to make room. Pete climbs the stairs to the sound of Brendon’s sleepy grumbling. 

The street outside is silver with moonlight, and Pete settles onto the couch in an inelegant sprawl.

+8+

Pete is the one that gets them up in the morning, after a restless two or three hours of sleep. He keeps dreaming of the Chicago skyline, and ice. He woke shivering despite the soaring temperatures.

They pack the last of their things into the back of the car and Spencer and Brendon have a brief but intense game of rock-paper-scissors over shotgun. Brendon loses and packs himself into the middle backseat with ill-grace, muttering mutinously and tucking his face into his increasingly grimy Barbie blanket. Dallon buckles himself in beside him with a silently amused expression. 

Spencer claims the passenger side with a wide grin and promptly reaches over to fidget with the music player. 

It’s only after Pete’s settled into the driver’s seat that he realizes there’d never even been a moment’s argument over who would drive. It makes the breath rattle in his throat for a moment, sick and fast, but he forces his hands onto the wheel and puts the car into motion and it more or less passes. 

He’s good at this kind of thing. Spearheading the charge, or whatever. He flatters himself, at least. 

It’s the sound of Blink-182 they pull away from the curb to, Spencer with his trusty battered pencils in hand, Dallon humming along quietly and Brendon breaking into snatches of lyrics every time he forgets he’s pissed off. 

It's a new thing, traveling with more than Brendon. A good thing too, Spencer's sarcastic, veiled caring and Dallon's sly affection balancing out Pete and Brendon's extremes. Pete's never been too good at emotions _or_ control and as for Brendon...

Brendon looks so much better now, smiles more. Spencer knows what to do when Brendon goes quiet, and Dallon and Brendon get along like a house on fire. 

Pete drives and laughs and provides commentary to Brendon’s wild chatter. It doesn’t help the anxiety churning harder and harder in his stomach. He’s not sure where it’s coming from or why but it makes his movements jerky. 

He takes the long middle watch when they stop for the night, staring out into the moonlit night and worrying compulsively at a tear in his jeans. When Brendon takes the last watch he tries to sleep but ends up staring out the window until his eyes burn. 

He gets up when Dallon does, slips into the driver’s seat and tries to blink away the blurriness of his vision. It kind of works. He’s a little fuzzy, a little lagging, but it’s not like he has to contend with traffic.

+8+

He doesn’t sleep the next night either except for a brief period just as the sun is coming up. He jerks awake maybe twenty minutes after he went to sleep, gasping for air and heart pounding against his ribs.

He can’t remember the dream. 

He doesn’t try to go back to sleep, makes quiet conversation with Brendon until Spencer and Dallon wake up and they get moving. Brendon doesn’t really seem to notice that Pete hasn’t slept. He acts more grateful to have someone to talk to, if anything. 

“I can drive if you want a break,” Spencer offers quietly as they’re stuffing breakfast into their faces. Pete laughs. It comes out a little hollow, but hey, he’s tired. They’re all tired. 

“Nah, I got this,” he says easily and climbs into the driver’s seat. His head feels fuzzy. 

He’s not as sure by the second time he narrowly avoids swiping a stalled out car on the side of the road. The habit of keeping to lane dividers has finally fallen by the wayside but even driving right down the middle of the highway there are still the cars to contend with. He keeps losing focus, floating dreamily until he realizes he’s put them on a collision course with another van. 

“Are you trying to kill us?” Dallon asks when Pete swerves away from the car he’d been inches from ramming, jerkier than strictly necessary. His tone is joking but Pete can’t breathe for a moment because _no_. 

“No,” he snaps. Dallon raises his hands conciliatorily and Pete feels Spencer’s gaze boring a hole in the back of his head. He ignores it. 

They stop for lunch in Bumfuck, Nowhere, a little gas station oasis that’s totally deserted. They sit at a little picnic table and pick through packages of crackers. Dallon is teasing Brendon about something to do with his hair or maybe his glasses, Brendon protesting loudly and trying desperately to rouse an amused Spencer to his defense. It’s hysterical even if Pete can’t follow the thread of the conversation so well. 

There’s a sharp ache behind his eyes that almost goes away when he chugs some water and presses his fingers to his temples. 

They run out of crackers eventually and Spencer mentions that they should get back on the road. Pete’s laughing as he goes to stand, reaching for the dregs of his water bottle, and then his vision is dark and he’s stumbling, a roaring in his ears. He’s upright again in a moment, vision slowly fading back in, but it’s too late. They’ve seen it. 

Spencer is watching him when he finally shakes the shades from his vision. He’s not staring, not really, but it prickles through Pete anyway. 

“You should sleep, man,” Spencer says, just a shade too serious to be the off-handed that he’s pretending it is. 

He’s just so _tired_ , is why he snaps. It’s worse on the road, in the open, when he has Brendon and now Spencer and Dallon. His insomnia is worse than it’s ever been, and it’s so _dark_ at night, with no city lights around them. It’s just… easier not to sleep. Even when his eyes have begun to burn a little bit. Even when turning his head is enough to make him dizzy. 

He knows he’s going to crash but he can get through the day, until they stop again. Just till then. Then he can sleep. 

“I’m fine,” he says sharply. He tries on a smile to cushion his words and knows it doesn’t work. Suddenly they’re all looking at him, all three of them, staring at him. It itches at his skin. 

“Are you sure?” Brendon begins, concern drawing his eyebrows together. 

“I’m fine. Christ, you’re not my _mom_ ,” he snaps thoughtlessly, and then flinches. All of them do. They don’t talk about family. They just don’t. 

“Shit. Sorry.” 

“You’re gonna need to sleep eventually,” Spencer warns after a beat of painful silence. “Come on, man, Chicago will be-,” 

Panic. Panic, and the bitter taste of metal in his mouth with it. Pete has to catch his breath because, Christ, he can’t think about Chicago without his vision starting to tunnel again. 

“Chicago will be fine,” Pete says, clinging desperately to the turn at the corners of his mouth. It’s not enough, he’s slipping back into the fear, but it’s all he _has_. God, the fear is choking him like he’s about to drown in a fucking desert.

He can see them out of the corner of his eye, exchanging glances, uncomfortable and cautious. He ignores it as best he can. So what if his smile starts to look a little like a snarl.

“Sure, dude,” Spencer says, placating.

Pete climbs back into the driver’s seat before any of the rest of them even get up, clings to the pleather in his hands and tries to breathe through the dizzy sickness in his chest. 

“You need to chill out,” Spencer says, and Pete jolts. 

The car door is open and his hands are loose in his lap. Brendon and Dallon are still sitting together a ways away, chattering quietly. Spencer is standing right by the car door, and somehow Pete had fallen asleep in the space between one second and the next without even noticing. 

His head feels fuzzy, feels thick and revolting and hot. His joints don’t feel connected to his body when he tries to lift an arm. Distantly he notes that his hand is shaking, trembling like a leaf in a storm. He draws his hands back to wrap around his stomach, ignores that he can feel the trembling all through his body. 

“Fuck off,” he slurs out. 

Spencer just looks at him for a long moment. 

“I said fuck _off_ ,” he growls. Spencer tilts his head to the side, regarding Pete for another long moment. His expression is coolly disinterested. A mask, Pete knows it is, but it’s a good one and it hurts to have directed at him. 

He’s angry, suddenly. So _angry_ , sudden and harsh in his throat, burning rage that tastes of desperation. He wants to punch Spencer, wants to feel his nose break under Pete’s fist, wants to kick the shit out of him and doesn’t know why. He’s panting with it, hands itching and curling into fists. 

“I get what you’re doing,” Spencer says at last. “And I get why.” 

“You don’t know _shit_ ,” Pete snarls. His fist flies out almost without a conscious decision to move, punching the steering wheel. It thumps pathetically and his bones throb. 

“I know you’re going to get us killed,” Spencer says, tone ruthlessly cool. Pete sucks in a breath. 

“No,” he tries to say but Spencer interrupts him relentlessly. 

“It’s not even gonna be on purpose, will it? You’re gonna be driving tonight and you’re gonna fall asleep and we’ll crash. Or, fuck. Something will come at us and we won’t get away in time because you’re gonna lag too much. Or something, but it’ll be your fault.”

“ _No_ ,” he tries again, louder this time, and he catches Brendon and Dallon looking up out of the corner of his eye. Spencer doesn’t flinch, just rocks back on his heels and stuffs his hands in his pockets. His eyes are steady on Pete’s. 

“You can’t save us,” he says softly, and Pete punches him. 

He aims for Spencer’s face but his arm feels weak and disconnected, and it hits him a glancing blow to the jaw. Spencer barely stumbles back and Pete is left hanging half out of the car door, winded and panting. His chest hurts like it’s cracking open and he’s about to cry, he can feel it. 

Brendon shouts in shock and when Pete finally heaves himself most of the way upright he sees that he and Dallon are both on their feet, hovering like they’re about to run over and separate Pete and Spencer. 

“S’fine, Brendon,” Spencer says loudly. He’s pressing a palm to the place Pete’s fist had caught him and he’s looking at Pete with gentleness in his gaze. It hurts worse than the disinterest had. 

“Spencer,” Pete says softly. It’s all he can say. 

“You don’t have to save us, Pete,” Spencer tells him and reaches out. Pete lets him pull him out of the car, helping him to stand. His legs feel weak, shaking. His body is finally giving out, betraying him at last. 

“Can you drive?” Pete asks after a beat, the closest he can get to acknowledging what Spencer had said. Spencer regards him for a long time. 

“Yeah, think so,” he replies at last and lets Pete go. He stumbles for a moment before locking his knees and rolling his shoulders. His guts feel like they’re shaking, adrenaline and exhaustion in equal, opposite measure. 

Brendon is staring at him when he focuses, expression scared and young. 

“M’fine,” Pete tells him. Tries on a smile. It’s successful, if the way Brendon relaxes in a rush is any judge. “Just need some sleep.” 

Brendon nods seriously and when Pete crawls into the backseat he crawls in after. The obnoxious Barbie blanket is tucked around him with solicitous hands and Brendon settles into a warm, squirming presence against his side. The car is quiet as Pete slips sideways into restless dreams but he can make out their breathing and the sound of the engine and it’s enough.

+8+

They’re somewhere in, Pete thinks, Nebraska. His battered, smudged map tells him so anyway. He’s been checking against the deserted towns they pass, relieved when they match the ones they should be passing according to the map.

Allegedly they’re sleeping. In reality, Pete is sitting on the hood of the car and Dallon is sitting beside him, quietly debating about bass guitar design and the value of punk music made after 1976. Spencer and Brendon are occupying the backseat, sleeping quietly, and it’s the closest thing to peaceful Pete’s willing to acknowledge. 

The fire appears on the horizon, a mile or so down the road. Pete isn’t sure when; they don’t notice it right away. 

Dallon notices it first, sliding across the hood of the car to elbow Pete in the ribcage and point noiselessly. It’s barely a pinprick of light but it’s flickering, orange, definitively different from a star. They stare for a beat. 

“Do you think… other people?” Dallon murmurs to him. Pete squints at it. 

“Looks like it,” he mumbles back, keeps his eyes on the flickering light. He can’t make out any figures around it. “But are they friendly?” 

“No way to know without saying hi,” Dallon offers, his tone much more confident than his expression is when Pete glances over. He’s looking back through the windshield, at Brendon and Spencer sleeping in the backseat. Brendon’s leaning on Spencer’s shoulder, Spencer’s head against the window. They’re bleached stark white in the sparse light of the moon but peaceful-looking nonetheless. 

Pete doesn’t have the time to parse Dallon’s expression, he’s turning back to Pete with a grin far too soon. 

“Wake the sleeping beauties and go make some friends?” he asks. Pete has to snort. 

“You get to do the waking,” he says and heaves himself up to find the gun where it’s still tucked into the glove compartment. 

Spencer and Brendon wake hard and Dallon barely avoids getting punched in the face. Pete watches it happen out of the corner of his eye, snickering quietly. Spencer has a hell of an arm. 

They settle down into anxious silence when Pete points out the light on the horizon. Dallon offers ideas for how to approach in a cautious undertone and Pete tries his best for rationality. It doesn’t really work so well, there’s a buzzing hum in the back of his head that’s nothing but _there are people, there are other, real people still alive_ that’s impossible to think clearly through. 

He only really pays attention when Brendon breaks his silence to reach out and pop open the glove compartment, fishing out the gun with shaky fingers. He offers it to Pete with a questioning noise, not quite a word. 

Pete stares down at the gun for a long moment, then another, doesn’t move until Brendon’s hand touches his again, uncertain. He sighs through his nose and puts it back into the glove compartment. 

“I’m not doing it like that,” he says, doesn’t bother to clarify. The other three understand or just don’t bother to question it. Pete doesn’t want it to be like that, a threat of violence when there just _doesn’t need to be_. He refuses to let their first meeting of another person be that way. He refuses to let the end of the world turn him into that. 

He draws in a breath, half-giddy. There are _people_. 

They drive the way across the brush to the fire in silence. It’s tense but the giddiness refuses to leave Pete’s ribcage. 

There’s someone standing in front of the fire when they pull up. They’ve got their back to the flames and their silhouette is too bulky with jackets to make out anything identifying. There isn’t anyone else, not that Pete can see, but he’s cautious when he steps out just the same. The fact that he doesn’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. 

The figure doesn’t say a word, just stares at them. Their posture is defensive. 

Pete steps cautiously right up to the edge of the firelight, gestures the other three to stay back. Dallon doesn’t. Pete can feel him, a warm, silent presence stepping up behind him. He can’t tell where Spencer and Brendon are, prays they stayed out of sight, and holds out both hands to show they’re empty. 

“Hi,” Pete says. 

“Hi,” the person say warily. They sound familiar, something about their voice ringing in Pete’s head, and he steps forward more squarely into the firelight. Squints, trying to see better. 

The figure sucks in a breath. 

“Pete?” they say, tone blank with shock and something else. Something like fear but not quite. 

He steps to the side a little and the light flares across his cheekbones. Familiar, familiar, and recognition breaks inside Pete’s chest. 

“Ryan fucking Ross,” Pete says, kicked out of him because it _is_. 

He stares for a moment, the broken-open feeling in his chest flaring into an ache of happiness. When he gets his bearings back he spins and shouts into the darkness in the direction of the car. “It’s Ryan! Brendon, Spencer, it’s fucking _Ryan!_ ”

“ _Spencer?_ ” Ryan has time to ask, voice cracking with disbelief, before Spencer’s shoving past Pete and into the ragged circle of firelight. 

“Ryan,” Spencer says, voice blank with shock. 

Ryan opens and closes his mouth a few times, face alive with more emotions than Pete has names for. His hand comes up like he’s trying to touch Spencer but can’t quite bring himself to do it. 

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” Ryan snaps at last, gaze hard and glittering through the gloom. It takes Pete a moment to place the sheen in his eyes as tears because he’s pretty sure that, despite all the shit he’s been through with the kid, he’s never seen him tear up like this. Not with frustration or joy, but with fresh emotional devastation.

“I’m not,” Spencer whispers, taking a step across the thin, dark ground between their group and Ryan’s skinny figure. It’s less than twenty feet but it feels like a mile. It feels as impassable as the canyon splitting the desert.

“You can’t-,” Ryan starts, and then stops himself with a ragged breath. He makes a nonsense gesture that probably means something to Spencer and steps forward. “You’re house was gone,” he finally says.

“I’m alive,” Spencer says, and Ryan takes the last two steps, grabs him by the front of his shirt like he’s going to punch him. He doesn’t, just stutters in space for a moment before lunging into a hug that Spencer returns fiercely. They’re shaking, from what Pete can see in the dark and the flickering of Ryan’s fire.

Pete turns away. He’s seeing more than he should. More than he wants to see.

Dallon has disappeared but Brendon is half a step behind him, face broken open and raw. There’s longing and resentment and other, more esoteric things there and Pete puts his hand on his shoulder for a long moment before stepping past him.

“Brendon,” he hears Ryan say faintly as he walks back to their car. The tone isn’t exactly welcoming but it’s not exactly hostile, either. Cautious mostly. Pete’s too far away to hear what Brendon says back but Brendon doesn’t show up at his side as he walks away so he assumes nothing too bad.

Dallon is leaning against the car, watching the fire with a blank expression. It’s easier than ever to see the dark circles under his eyes, when he’s standing still for the first time in days. His cheekbones look more pronounced than usual and the faint flare of the fire turns his face for just a moment into something distorted, twisted, wrong. Some primal distrust flares in Pete’s gut.

Then he’s looking up at Pete with a little grin and he’s just a tired dude with no one to turn to but the people by the fire and Pete. Not prime choices.

“S’cute,” he says. There’s naked jealousy in his tone.

“They’re lucky to find each other,” Pete says dully. Not reproof and not agreement. Just a fact.

Dallon tilts his head at him curiously. Neither of them says a word for a long time in the strangling, emotionally-charged quiet.

“This is awful,” Dallon says with deep feeling, startling a laugh from Pete. It shakes loose the tight feeling in his chest. “Wanna go forage or something? We’re getting low on food.”

Pete considers for a long minute. He can make out the low sound of voices from the direction of the fire and when he glances over the light is reflecting from Brendon’s glasses, Ryan’s face, Spencer’s expansive gesturing. They seem… okay. Better than he’d ever expected. 

Pete shrugs, feels a grin steal across his face easier than it ever does anymore. “Yeah, sounds good. Tell them we’re going?”

“Doubt they’ll notice we’re gone,” Dallon says, that same tangled emotion in his voice, but he walks towards the fire willingly enough.

Dallon finds Pete again minutes later, where he’s unloading their supplies from the back of the car to free up space. He’d been right, they’re running low on nearly everything except candy bars, and the empty water bottles outnumber the filled ones by a worrying amount.

“Ryan had a map,” Dallon tells him, and spreads the map on the hood of the car. Pete grunts an acknowledgement and fumbles their flashlight out of the front seat on his way to take a look. It’s getting light towards the horizon but not light enough to make out the fiddly streets and twisting highways with any precision.

Ryan’s map is more accurately an atlas, spread open to the page detailing their area. There’s a route drawn in red ballpoint pen stretching from one end of the map to the other, likely from Vegas to… wherever Ryan had been going. The cities most of the way across are all crossed out, marked with labels like _burned_ and _flooding_ and – worryingly – _zombies_. A few of the smaller towns are circled in blue and unlabeled – safe, presumably. There’s indecipherable scribbling on the top margin that might be words but when Pete squints at it they don’t resolve into anything relevant.

“We’re here,” Dallon say, jabbing a finger at a spot right where the highway marked in pen started to bend back to travel south. Pete peers down at the map and pokes tentatively at a tiny spot labeled North Platte, less than three miles from their location according to the map.

“Small town, less chance of major disaster?” he theorizes to Dallon, who nods along thoughtfully.

“Makes sense. Driver or shotgun?”

“Driver,” Pete declares instantly. Dallon bows and sketches a sarcastic salute, gathering up the atlas and climbing into the passenger seat.

Pete settles into the driver’s seat with a sense of unpleasant déjà vu. Dallon is a hell of a lot taller than Brendon, and infinitely less emotive, but it’s just Pete and one other person again and he takes a moment to breathe in the smell of smoke and the feeling of pleather-wrapped wheel under his palms.

“You good?” Dallon asks.

“Great,” Pete says sunnily and twists the wheel, jerking them onto the highway again.

+8+

North Platte is empty when Pete drives through it, which was expected. Less expected are the bodies.

There aren’t many but what there is haven’t been treated well. There’s not a lot left, for one thing, torsos and heads and limbs missing or displaced far up the street from the rest of the body. They’re old as well, for the most part, desiccated and blackened with desert sun. 

Pete’s kind of getting used to them. His stomach doesn’t turn as much. As long as he doesn’t look too closely, doesn’t think about it, he does just fine. It’s hard to see detail in the moonlight, anyway. 

“Not a good sign,” Dallon pipes up to say laconically. Pete snorts agreement, eyes the dark streets around them but sees nothing. 

“We need food?” he shrugs, and pulls to a stop in front of the tiny grocery store. 

The streets are still deserted when they ease their way out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Dallon leads the way into the store, hands full of bags. Pete follows, eyes on the streets, dim flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other. 

When they both make their way inside they stand for a long beat, playing the beam of the flashlight from one end of the room to the other. 

There’s food all over the floor, burst packages of candy and molding packages of bread. It smells musty and sort of damp but not as bad as the store in Vegas, not nearly. There’s no bodies either, no smell of meat in the air. Nothing really seems to be missing, the absence of looting not completely unusual but not promising either. 

“You go for food, I’ll go for water?” Dallon suggests when they’ve made sure the store is empty. Pete agrees by tossing him a bag and heading over to the shelves of cans, by the little display window. It’s got piles of convenient, promising cans. 

He’s sorting them mindlessly, one pile for definite no’s and a pile each for yes and maybe, when something distracts him. It’s a hint of movement, through the tiny display window. Across the street, in the shadows that mean a little side-road. 

Pete freezes. 

Dimly he can hear Dallon rummaging in the freezer, complaining under his breath about the spoiled milk and smell. He opens his mouth to say something but nothing comes out, not a word, not even a sound. He’s frozen. 

A _thing_ is creeping across the street towards them. 

It’s huge, _huge_ , and in the dim moonlight Pete thinks he can make out the shine of scales and fur. It’s on all fours, gait ungainly, unnatural, joints bending wrong, something absurdly graceful. It’s mesmerizing to look at and Pete can’t look away until the thing’s head tilts a little and light shines off of tiny mad eyes and a mouthful of teeth like something out of a Burton movie. 

Except it’s real. It’s real and those tiny, crazed eyes are fixed on Pete. There’s nothing but a sheet of plate glass between the two of them and he’s throwing himself to his feet and away just in time. 

There’s a moment where Pete is scrambling madly across the room and the only sound is his incoherent yelling. Dallon, turning so slowly to stare at him. The bag of water bottles falling from his hand as his eyes travel past Pete to see what’s coming. 

The door more or less explodes inwards, to the sound of Dallon’s shrill yelp of surprise. Glass pings across the room in sharp shards. Pete slams into the wall of freezers next to Dallon and whirls to look back, confused because there isn’t a set of claws closing over his spine yet. 

The monster growls, shrill and grating, and heaves against the doorframe. Pete fumbles his flashlight up and shines it in the monster’s direction. 

It’s too narrow. 

That’s the only thing saving them, that the doorway is just too narrow for the monster’s massive shoulders. It howls in frustration, mad eyes on them, and Pete has to slap his hands over his ears because the noise is piercing and awful. 

The thing pauses for a moment in its mad heaving against the wall, swinging its head between them slowly. To Pete, and then to Dallon. They’re frozen in space, each waiting for the others to make a move.

It isn’t a dog and isn’t a lizard but it looks a little like both. The snout is all wolf, furred and rippled back in a snarl but the teeth revealed are all lizard. The body is patchily furred, sort of scaly. The limbs are all wrong. Pete thinks its joints are backwards because they just didn’t _bend_ that way normally. 

The monster-thing heaves against the doorframe again and the wall creaks ominously. 

It isn’t going to hold and when it fails Pete and Dallon are trapped with their backs to freezers full of spoiled ice cream and warm beer. Pete’s little knife wouldn’t be enough, not here, not against this.

He thinks of Brendon, suddenly. And Spencer. Whether they would come looking for them if Pete and Dallon can’t escape from this. Pete kind of hopes not. 

Pete glances over to Dallon for a split second, catches Dallon watching him back with eyes wide and glassy with terror. They flit back to the monster-animal as it lets out a thin, shrill hiss. Frustration, Pete would almost say, if his head weren’t so totally blank with terror.

“Pete,” Dallon croaks out, and the monster _shrieks_. The sound is guttural, shrill, like a cat’s scream put through a blender. It almost masks the sound it makes heaving again at the doorframe. The wood cracks again, but holds. “Pete, is there a back room?”

Pete chances flicking his flashlight over to the wall behind the cash-register counter. The beam reveals a door, a promising door with a little plaque set in it labeled ‘Employees Only’.

The monster hisses and scratches its claws against the tiles for purchase, screeching and awful. Pete hurriedly returns his flashlight to it.

“I think so,” he mumbles. “Hide in there?”

“Yeah,” Dallon says, and breathes out a ragged huff of air. “We’re gonna go for it as slow as we can. If that thing looks like it’s breaking through, book it.”

“Right,” Pete says, and his voice feels stupidly thick in his throat.

His first sideways footstep heralds a renewed scrabble of the monster’s claws on tile, the creak of the wall, hissing breath and near-continuous growling. Pete backs his way towards the counter, eyes on the wall, Dallon a foot in front of him doing likewise. 

They make it maybe twenty feet. The monster howls and heaves one more time and the whole wall groans, buckling. 

“Pete, _go,_ ” Dallon shouts and whirls, pushing Pete back towards the wall. Pete turns but he’s slow enough to see the wall breaking. The cracks spreading in the plaster, the splintered joints giving way, the shatter of what glass remained in the windows. 

Pete’s the right way around and sprinting for the door to the back room before he sees anything else. The sound of the wall giving way is still enough to vibrate the whole store, windows and shelves. 

Burst-open packages of food skitter across the floor and Pete almost slips on some stray Skittles. He catches himself just in time, throwing himself headlong across the counter to hit the floor by the door. Dallon slams into his back, hard enough that Pete knows if they survive this there’ll be a bruise.

In the front of the shop the animal screams again, piercing, apparently confounded by the shelves in its way.

Dallon is on his feet first, scrabbling at the doorknob with both hands. It holds for a worrying moment and Pete tries to imagine how they’re going to escape if it’s locked. There’s a blinding second where he realizes they can’t, that it’ll come down to death or… or one of them sacrificing the other, maybe, and Pete feels sick.

The door clicks open and Dallon hauls Pete through it by the back of his jacket.

Pete’s hacking for breath and fighting the jacket back down from around his throat but he slams his back to the door with Dallon. The latch clicks just in time for a thudding weight to land against it and through it the sound of the lizard-thing screaming like it’s dying.

The sound is earsplitting and beyond loud, but the frustrated anger is obvious. There’s a thump like a paw hitting the door but it’s weak, losing interest.

“Fucking _suck_ on it,” Pete grits out and digs his heels into the ground for extra leverage. Just to be sure.

“Get that couch, we’ll block the door,” Dallon tells him, voice strained. Pete scrambles upright obediently.

The room is dusty with disuse but it’d been a break room before that. There are posters on the wall, looking faded already despite it being only a little more than a week. A whiteboard with names gridded on it. A vending machine in the far corner, all cheerfully colored snacks and soda. The couch against the wall is heavy-looking at least. Pete has to put all his weight into moving it.

When it’s a few feet away Dallon risks vaulting over the back and helping Pete shove it up against the door. The thump it makes when it hits the wood is reassuring and Pete’s knees hit the floor before he’s given his legs the order to give out. Dallon topples forward to lay on the couch, facedown.

“We’re alive,” Pete gasps out.

Dallon’s hand settles on the back of his neck and it’s so hot it burns in contrast to the chill of his sweat. He’s got big hands, Pete notes distantly, they span his neck from the nape to past his shoulders. He presses back into it mindlessly. It feels better than the stale, cold air.

“We’re alive,” Dallon echoes and turns his face enough to blink one eye at Pete. It’s glittering, sharp and dark. “Christ.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Pete jokes breathlessly and leans forward to press his face into the cushion next to Dallon’s shoulder.

Dallon mutters something into faded couch stuffing that sounds bitter. Blasphemous. Sounds a little like _fuck god_. Pete doesn’t mention it, just crawls up to get on the couch too. It’s warmer there, he reasons dully with himself, pressed along Dallon’s back.

Dallon heaves himself over and rolls to peek out at him again, eye still glittering and dark. His hair is falling in his eyes and Pete knows what he’s going to do the instant before he does it.

Dallon’s mouth settles on his softly. It’s exhaustion, not tenderness or affection, but Pete drinks it in anyway. Presses back into it, levers himself up to tilt his head a little. It’s dry, Dallon’s lips chapped and Pete’s bitten to hell, but when Dallon’s tongue presses against his bottom lip he opens up willingly.

They break after a moment, breathing combined air that tastes like dust and spit. Dallon’s watching him again. His expression is opaque but a burning hand is spread across Pete’s hip and he knows all about that much at least. He’s an old hand at fucking away the fear and the anger.

“You want?” he asks, puts a little bit of cartoonish purr into his voice.

Dallon laughs. It’s a good sound, genuine and almost sweet. There’s no interest in it and Pete feels… relief.

“You always fuck after nearly getting killed?” Dallon asks, carelessly because there’s no way he could _know_.

There’s the flash of wing case. The buzz of a million, a hundred million beating wings. Crawling weight, all over him, the taste of chitin in his mouth, the butt of a gun in his grip, Brendon, Brendon’s _blood_ but he’d done the right thing, he knows he had-

It hadn't happened. None of it. Brendon is safe and fine, in the company of Spencer and Ryan. There are no locusts here. He’s alive. 

Pete grins and feels how brittle it is.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he says. He sound normal. He knows he does. Dallon looks at him curiously anyway, too knowing. He doesn’t ask, thought. Pete’s grateful for that.

“Fair enough,” he says and lifts the hand on Pete’s hip to run through his hair. It stands on end a little. They haven’t washed it in… god, nine days now? Pete’s already losing track. Dallon’s flashing grin a moment later distracts him. It’s not important, there’s never going to be a schedule again.

“Wanna make out anyway?” Dallon asks, taunting and bright, and it’s enough to make the last of the bugs crawling under his skin disappear. Pete’s still laughing when Dallon’s mouth collides with his, messy tongues and warmth. It’s good.


	4. Chapter 4

The beast-thing is gone when they cautiously pull the couch back and slit open the door. The store is light enough to see, dawn sunshine coming through the ruined front wall. There’s food all over the floor, shelves toppled in evidence of the tantrum the animal must have thrown.

Dallon peers carefully out the ruined windows as Pete hastily shoves cans and packages into his bags. They haul ass back into the car, Pete’s skin prickling as they cross the sidewalk, and only breathe easily when the doors are shut and the engine is purring. Dallon keeps careful watch on the alleys and side roads as they drive out of town but if he sees something he doesn’t mention it and it doesn’t follow them.

The drive back is quiet and Dallon fidgets the whole time, fingers digging into the material of his jeans and picking at a rip in the upholstery. Pete hands him a package of nuts and Dallon tears it to confetti but the action seems to calm him down. 

Ryan, Spencer, and Brendon are all sitting around the fire when Pete pulls to a stop next to them.

They’re spaced out almost comically around the fire pit, Ryan and Brendon across from each other and Spencer equidistant between them. The way Brendon and Ryan are eyeing each other is far from friendly but it’s missing the animosity Pete had been a little worried about. He’d call the emotion wariness, but there’s a little too much history there for that word to be strictly true.

He vaguely thinks he once might have extracted a song from that image, three people who know each other so well, the complicated web of emotions, the campfire between them. Something for Patrick to thrash into sounding passably good. But now he’s just concerned about how they’re going to get through the day.

“How’d things go?” Brendon bounces to his feet and skips over when Pete throws open the car door and steps out. It’s pretty obviously an excuse for Brendon to escape from the little circle around the fire. “Took you guys long enough, Jesus!”

He knocks into Pete for a bit before stepping over to nudge at Dallon. Dallon puts up with it for a moment before knocking a gentle fist against Brendon’s head and pushing him away a little. 

“Fine,” Pete says, exchanging a glance with Dallon. “We got some stuff. We might wanna pass on stopping in that town though.”

“Cool,” Brendon says, beaming. There’s something willfully ignorant about it, and Pete is happy. It wouldn’t… help anything, to tell the others about North Platte. It wouldn’t do anything but put everyone else on edge.

“So are we leaving?” Spencer says, coming up behind Brendon, and silence falls with guillotine abruptness. Ryan is standing awkwardly at his shoulder in that weird, mostly-harmless Ryan Ross loom Pete’s never seen anyone else manage.

Brendon goes stiff and doesn’t look behind him.

“We can,” Pete says evenly, keeping his eyes on Spencer.

Ryan hisses out a breath, audible only because everyone else is barely breathing at all. That’s the only noise for a long beat and then Dallon’s laughing and shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. It sounds distinctly sarcastic.

“Emotionally constipated posturing aside, the four of us were headed to Chicago,” he directs at Ryan. Pete feels himself go kinda red.

“We are,” He confirms, and the silence falls again. Less tense this time, maybe, Ryan looking considering instead of obstinate.

“I was going to Chicago too,” he volunteers unexpectedly. “I was… I was gonna look for Jon.”

There’s a stutter in his voice, the same fear Pete knows so well. That there would be a body, or worse. Nothing at all. It’s a sympathetic ache in his chest and god, they’d been friends once upon a time for fuck’s sake.

“You could come with us,” he offers impulsively, and catches the jitter of movement that’s Brendon bouncing a little in place out of the corner of his eye. Dallon reaches out and lays a hand on his wrist, stilling him wordlessly. They don’t object, though Spencer looks back and forth between Ryan and Brendon like he’s expecting a fight.

“…Alright,” Ryan says at last, sounding more vulnerable than Pete knows what to do with. “If you’re okay with it that sounds good.”

His things fit in well, a backpack full of food and water and not much else. The acoustic he clings to with grim determination and eyes that dare anyone to try and take it. Pete doesn’t even consider trying to get him to leave it behind. There’s room, and anyway there are some things he just can’t make himself do.

There’s nothing accidental about the shuffling of seating that gets Brendon in the passenger seat, Dallon at one window and Ryan at the other, Spencer in between. Spencer had orchestrated it with something approaching real beauty, a whirlwind of bitchy fussing and nearly-casual fingers pressing on Brendon’s shoulder, Ryan’s hip, Dallon’s elbow.

Pete meets his gaze in the rearview mirror and nods his thanks. Spencer blinks back innocently and smiles when Pete pulls onto the freeway.

It’s probably the only way this could work, but it’s a way nonetheless and it does work.

+8+

It promptly stops working.

“So this is completely fucked,” Ryan says conversationally from behind Pete.

Brendon makes a sharp motion in the passenger seat like he’s about to turn and say something. Pete reaches over without looking and grabs his shoulder, holding him in place. Brendon subsides with a wordless mutter. Pete’s gaze is riveted out the windshield, unable to look away from the road.

It ends raggedly, twenty feet in front of the car. Buckled and broken by tree roots.

It’s a forest, the kind of forest Pete’s never seen anywhere but in movies. Thick and old like it had been growing there for years instead of days, some trunks wider-around than Pete is tall, taller than most houses. Some of the trees are maybe oak, Pete recognizes the leaves in a vague way, but there are birch and pine and plants he doesn’t have names for as well. It’s a dizzying kaleidoscope of green and brown blocking the way more surely than a wall.

“We can’t drive through that,” he finally says, and ignores Spencer’s derisive snort. “So, fuck. What do we do?”

“Go around?” Brendon offers, and exchanges a look with Pete. They’re remembering the same thing, the canyon in the desert and the long trek around it. The days lost. The glass town. Medford. The _locusts_.

The thought of the wasted time, how long it would take to backtrack and plot an alternate route, scratches at Pete. Chicago is so close, almost at his fingertips. They’re half a day past North Platte, somewhere on the border of Nebraska and Iowa, and less than a day from Chicago.

“Through,” Dallon suggests after a beat of unpleasant silence establishes none of them are enthused about the idea of trying to find a way around the potentially unending forest. “On foot?”

“We may have to,” Pete tells them grimly. “But there’s no way in hell I’m going in there when it’s getting dark.” 

No one argues when he reverses back into a U-turn, driving them away from the forest. He parks them by the side of the road, a couple of miles between them and the thin dark line on the horizon that’s the forest. There’s a little campsite complete with a grill and picnic tables, totally deserted except for a single camping van. 

The late afternoon sunshine is warm and reassuringly normal on Pete’s cheeks as he watches Dallon and Brendon break into the van.

“It’s empty,” Brendon calls out the door a few minutes later. Pete shrugs lazily and Brendon disappears back inside.

Pete turns back to where Ryan and Spencer are leaning together against the side of the car, muttering to each other quietly. They go silent when Pete approaches, not that he begrudges that. He can’t imagine there’s been much privacy for emotionally fraught conversation lately, what with the end of the world.

“How do you feel about barbeque?” he asks with a winning smile and holds out a can of pork and beans.

After a solid ten minute argument with Ryan over whether it could be called a barbeque without any real meat – and Pete had forgotten that, how ferociously Ryan defended his semantics, a memory half-fondness and half-exasperation – Spencer is stoking a tiny fire in the barbecue, moving the cans around on the grill with a stick. Brendon and Dallon are ferrying things out of the camper van a few feet away and dumping them on the ground.

A pair of boxers, grimy and dust-stained, flies past Pete in the breeze. Brendon giggles, ducking back inside before Pete can retaliate.

“It’s cleaned out if we wanted to sleep in here,” Dallon calls after a moment, muffled by the walls of the van.

“We’ll take the car,” Spencer says before Pete or Ryan can say anything. He’s got his eyes on Ryan, expression worried. Ryan’s got a little frown tucked into the corner of his mouth too. His eyes flicker over to Pete a second later, cautious.

“I’ll take first watch and crash in the van with them,” Pete says quickly, taking the out Spencer’s handed to him. He’s not eager to get Ryan and Brendon into a confined space together either. 

Spencer’s expression turns relieved and Ryan smiles a little bit, and ducks his head, starts to fiddle with his shoelaces.

“Hot beans and shit, ready to go,” Spencer calls a minute later, using a pair of sticks to lift each can off the smoking grill and onto the gravel.

Brendon bounces out of the van, Dallon hot on his heels, a fistful of silverware gleaming in one hand and a stack of paper plates in the other. He’s grinning widely, not even the sight of Ryan dampening it. Which might have had something to do with the flowered sunhat perched on his head.

“Nice hat, Urie,” Spencer tells him and makes grabby hands at the plates.

“Thank you very much, Spencer Smith,” Brendon says, forking the plates and silverware over. When his hands are free he fluffs his limp hair, preening and bending into ridiculous model poses. Dallon obligingly lets himself be used as a stationary prop for a moment before dropping without warning to sit on the ground next to Spencer. Brendon overbalances and lands on his ass with a grunt on his far side.

Ryan huffs out a tiny puff of laughter, almost inaudible under the sound of Spencer cursing as he burns himself on the hot cans, Brendon complaining about his bruised ass and Dallon teasingly offering to kiss it better. He’s watching them with a certain unconscious openness that has Pete looking away, down at the plate Spencer hands him grouchily.

The pork n’ beans taste like beans and salt and not so much pork, and Pete shovels them into his mouth with fervor.

“I meant to ask,” Ryan says into the companionable silence, “what’s up with the dresses?”

Pete glances down instinctively and yeah. He’s still wearing the dress, bright and flowery and somehow he’d forgotten all about it. It’s grimy now, hangs limp on his body, a long tear up one side of the skirt. The flowers are still just as bright though. He picks at them for a moment, fighting down a guilty flush because it’s not like it’s _weird_ , not at the end of the world.

Spencer’s is gone, had torn irreparably somewhere before they’d found Ryan to be replaced by another baggy tee shirt. Dallon’s is hiked up and tied on one hip, more of a tunic than anything. Brendon’s is still down like Pete’s, fluttering becomingly in the wind.

“We’re wearing them,” Brendon says. His tone is cool, edging into unfriendly. Pete feels more than sees Ryan stiffen up.

“Why, though?” Ryan asked, tone falling into veiled disparagement that forces Brendon’s chin down and his eyes to flash.

“Because why _not_?” Brendon says to his plate. What Pete can see of his face is still and pale and his hand is fisted in the material of the skirt. Dallon reaches over wordlessly and flicks his whitening knuckles gently until they relax again.

“They’re comfortable,” Spencer says into the silence. His tone is firm and Ryan looks over at him for a long minute. There’s silence until he snorts and turns back to his plate of beans.

“Paisley would have looked better though,” he mutters a few minutes of strained silence later and Brendon chokes on a bark of laughter that sound completely involuntary.

“Fuck you,” he gets out between coughs. The quiet falls again but it’s less fraught and Pete rubs at his eyes, tired all of a sudden.

+8+

Pete volunteers for the first watch and when it starts to get dark he sits himself down on the little picnic table to watch the horizon.

He can make out a hint of the forest in the distance, a still black line on the horizon stretching from one side to the other. Otherwise there isn’t much of anything to see, hills and grass and deserted highway. The car on one side, the figures of Ryan and Spencer huddled together in the backseat, gesturing silently to each other. The van on the other, windows dark and quiet.

The moon comes up before the sun’s set all the way, bright and nearly full. Pete watches it climb idly. He misses his headphones a little bit; the silence is oppressive and he resorts to humming his way through most of Take This to Your Grave before his throat gets too dry and he stops.

Ryan and Spencer are still awake when the moon hits the top of the sky and Pete decides it’s time for a shift change. They startle when Pete taps on the window but Spencer climbs out without a complaint and hops up on the hood of the car.

Ryan watches him for a long moment through the window, expression blank, before glancing at Pete defiantly and turning over to face the back of the seat. Pete shrugs and scoops his flashlight out of his pocket, lighting the way back to the van with flickering dim light.

He trips over a dip in the ground and nearly eats pavement before catching himself. He hears Spencer’s soft laughter in the dark but he doesn’t bother to turn around, just flips the bird in the general direction of the sound and keeps going.

The door squeaks a little when Pete pushes it open. He winces and closes it with both hands as quietly as he can, flashlight in his mouth and trained at the ground.

“Hey,” Dallon’s voice comes softly, and Pete startles so badly he drops his dim flashlight on his foot. He swears under his breath and spends a moment groping around after it. Catching it up from where it’d rolled under the chipped plastic table, he shines it vaguely in the direction the voice had come from, not bothering to get back to his feet.

Dallon squints into the light and waves jerkily until Pete moves the beam off to the side.

He’s sitting on the edge of the big bed, the one that takes up the back third of the van. Brendon’s behind him, fast asleep, position curled up so tightly it’s almost fetal. In the brief flare of dim light Pete can make out the pinched frown pulling his mouth tight, even asleep. The grip his has on his awful blanket, so tight it looks like he’s losing circulation.

He clicks the flashlight off and waits for his eyesight to adjust to the darkness.

“Spencer’s on next watch,” Pete says after a moment of silence has passed. He sees the dark blob of Dallon’s head move, a shrug or a nod.

Silence falls again, punctuated by Dallon’s steady breathing and Brendon’s snuffling, hitching sleep-noises.

“Tired?” Dallon asks. Pete thinks about it, shrugs, realizes Dallon probably can’t see it and heaves himself to something vaguely resembling standing upright.

“Kind of. Not really,” he says.

He hears Dallon getting to his feet and then there’s the brush of warmth, movement, the impression of Dallon’s ridiculously tall frame passing inches from him. A big hand catches his shoulder, slips down to his elbow and rests tentatively.

“Come look at the stars with me?” Dallon asks. There’s something lilting in his tone, a hint of irony. He’s a black shape on a background of slightly dimmer black.

“Romantic,” Pete jokes. Dallon laughs in an undertone and his hand falls away. Pete gets his feet properly under him and follows him outside again.

The stars are out, brilliantly bright without a single hint of light pollution anymore. With the moon starting to set they light up the landscape dim grey, enough to make out the car on the other side of the camping ground, the dim shape of Spencer sitting on the hood. Pete stares up at the stars and tries to read a familiar shape into them. He fails and isn’t sure if it’s because he never really took the time to try before or if the stars aren’t the same anymore.

Dallon’s hunkered down on his heels when Pete finally gives up and turns his attention back to his surroundings. He’s watching the sky too, blank expression belying the fierce brightness of his eyes.

“Are we out here to really watch the stars or was there something you didn’t want Brendon potentially hearing?” Pete asks, breaking the silence and watching Dallon twitch with surprise. “Because I’m good with either.”

Dallon cocks his head a little bit. Turns his eyes to Pete, bright with something Pete can’t really make out.

“Were they dating?” he asks.

Pete pauses for a long moment. Takes a deep breath, and then another one. Then he sits down and leans against the side of the van, feeling the brittle chill of the metal leeching into his jacket. Dallon settles beside him, a foot or so away.

He can’t pretend he doesn’t know what Dallon’s talking about, even though he kind of really wants to.

“They were bandmates,” he tells the air above his head, eyes on the stars and not on Dallon. “It didn’t end well.”

“Ah,” Dallon says, more of a breath than a word. He doesn’t continue.

“It’s a touchy subject for all of them,” Pete says at last, to disrupt the silence.

“Brendon’s scared Spencer’s going to leave with Ryan,” Dallon replies, not quite a non sequitur, and the breath seizes in Pete’s lungs.

“He wouldn’t,” he says, too loudly, the words involuntary.

Dallon turns his head against the cold metal of the van to look at him. His expression is thoughtful, a little vacant, nearly cruelly rational. Not quite calculating, but almost.

“I’m sure you’d know,” he says softly. Pete scowls and flips him off.

“Do you think he will?” he asks a beat later, trying not to let the sudden paranoia affect his voice. He’s not very successful.

“Spencer and I…” Dallon begins and then pauses, rubbing at his mouth. His eyes are far away when he begins again. “The first thing we looked for was Ryan. Before food or anything.”

“They were friends for a really long time,” Pete says numbly. He’s not sure what he’s trying to say. Dallon inclines his head, letting silence fall again. He’s watching Spencer when Pete looks over, eyes on the hunched figure sitting on the car. His expression is wistful.

Spencer is turned away, back to them.

“I’m gonna have to choose too.” Dallon returns his gaze to the stars. His voice is casual but his words are anything but. “If it comes down to it. Brendon or Spencer.”

“Who?” Pete asks thoughtlessly and regrets it an instant later. Dallon huffs a snort.

“Who would _you_ chose?” he asks, voice heavy with irony. When Pete looks over his face is in shadow, expression hidden. “I don’t know. Guess we’ll leave it ‘til the finish line.”

He heaves himself to his feet. He’s a massive silhouette against the stars, black and hunched and lonely-looking. Pete has to tilt his head all the way back to look at him. He’s watching Spencer again, eyes reflecting stars in tiny pinpricks.

“I’m going to bed,” he says, and climbs back into the van.

+8+

Spencer wakes them in the morning by banging a stick against the side of the van and yelling at the top of his lungs. Pete falls out of bed, Dallon punches himself in the face, and Brendon nearly climbs the ceiling. When they all pile out the door, bleary-eyed and grumpy, Spencer is grinning with malicious intent.

Dallon sneers at him elegantly and stalks past to the car with silently affronted dignity. Brendon marches right after him, nose in the air. Ryan is over by the fire-pit, fiddling with his acoustic and pretending not to sneak glances at them.

Pete leans against the door and yawns so wide he feels his jaw crack. The sun isn’t all the way up, white and barely warming the air around him. He watches the breeze toss some brush around blankly, feeling the morning grogginess leach slowly from his bones.

When he looks down at his feet he can make out the imprint of his ass, and Dallon’s, where they’d been sitting the night before. He frowns and scuffs them away vindictively.

Spencer is watching him when he looks back up, hands tucked into his back pockets. He looks tired and a little sad.

“What did you guys talk about?” he asks. Pete licks his lips and rubs at his eye where a sleepy ache is starting to build up.

“You saw?” he asks. Spencer shrugs.

“He wanted to know about Ryan,” he says after a moment. He decides to leave out the part about _choosing_. “I gave him the basics.”

Spencer bobs a nod for a moment before sighing and drooping a little.

“I can’t leave him, Pete, he’s my _best friend_ ,” he mumbles to his shoes.

Pete feels his breath stop for a moment. He tries to imagine himself in Spencer’s place, with Patrick. He can’t do it, can’t imagine being torn like that at all until he remembers the last tour. The sick anxiety in his gut before every show and the sick disappointment afterwards. The ugly words hissed between them, and the decision they were wordlessly making that yeah. 

It wasn’t working anymore, the band. 

Then the end of the world happened, and now it doesn’t matter. 

“We’ll figure this shit out,” he sighs, and pulls Spencer into a one-armed hug. Spencer goes stiffly and relaxes only after a moment and a bit of a shake from Pete. Pete thinks for a minute before grinning weakly and nudging at Spencer’s temple with his own. “You don’t have to fix everything, Spence.”

“Yeah I do,” Spencer mutters rebelliously but his color is better when Pete lets go and his shoulders aren’t hiked quite so high around his ears.

“Whatever, learn to take your own advice,” Pete teases and Spencer scuffs a shoes against the ground. His grin is bashful.

“Shut up,” he growls, sounds a little delighted before he squares his shoulders and shakes his hair out of his eyes. “Let’s get moving.”

Loading back into the car takes a minute at most, quiet grumbling at the early hour and the occasional application of elbow the most perilous part. It takes barely any longer before the forest is looming again in front of the car and they have to pull to a stop again.

The forest is just as deep and dark and huge as it had been yesterday. The trees don’t look menacing – not _exactly_ – but they do look nearly endless and impossibly easy to lose the way in. Pete eyes them nervously as they all climb out of the car and tries not to think about getting lost, wandering in endless circles until the food and water runs out.

He sort of fails.

“So I’m not sure how we’re gonna find our way through this shit,” Pete says, tries on a breezy smile like it’s not a big deal and he’s not an inch from freaking out a little. Maybe they _should_ try to find their way around the forest.

“I’ve got a compass.”

Ryan says it totally casually, like he’s a little surprised the rest of them don’t have one. When Pete eyes him askance he just shrugs. “It seemed like a good idea and I was right. What do you want from me.”

Pete shrugs grudgingly, admitting the truth in Ryan’s words.

“Fair enough. We just head, I don’t know, north-east-ish? Until we find something?”

“There’s some of the road left,” Dallon points out, and he’s right. There’s still blocks of pavement, buckled by roots and impassable by car but definitely good enough to follow. “We could just follow that.”

“For as long as it lasts,” Pete agrees. It’s the best plan they’ve got. “Gotta figure out what supplies to bring first.”

‘Figuring out what supplies to bring’ amounts mostly to a lot of unloading that Brendon flatters Spencer into doing by complimenting the size of his biceps. It’s a little hilarious to watch, Spencer glaring and flushing and trying really hard to hide both arms behind his back at once, until Pete realizes he’s been maneuvered by Dallon to stand closest to the pile of boxes they need to sort through.

“You guys are assholes,” he tells them mournfully as Dallon plucks the pile of backpacks out of his hands and retreats after Ryan and Brendon around the side of the car.

“Sure,” he’s told serenely and then everyone but Spencer is gone.

Spencer’s still bright pink and won’t meet Pete’s eyes.

“Sort,” he growls and points to the pile of boxes. Pete grins wordlessly and turns to start pulling bottles and cans and packages out of their respective boxes.

He gets into a rhythm, handing piles of food and water over whenever Dallon comes for them and tossing expired or empty containers back into the back of the car. It’s not hard work but it takes a fair amount of concentration and it takes him a while to notice when Dallon hasn’t shown up for the useable supplies for a few minutes.

What gets Pete’s attentions is a laugh from Brendon, fake and thin and high-pitched. 

He jolts upright because he hasn’t heard that particular laugh in months, not since-

Since the last time he and Ryan and Jon and Spencer had all been in a room together. Jon had made a weak joke Pete can’t remember and Brendon had done that same laugh. It’d been what had pressed it home to Pete, finally, that it was all over. That Panic wouldn’t ever be the same.

Spencer meets his eyes from where he’s stuck lifting a box out of the back of the car. His expression is horrified and he’s frantically edging his way around to drop the box a beat later. It takes too long and Pete leaves him to catch up. By the time Pete deposits the bag of cans on the ground and made his way around the side of the car Dallon is already there, hovering at the edges of what reminds Pete forcibly of a catfight.

“I said I can take them, Ross, they’re just fucking water bottles,” Brendon is saying. He’s got a grip on a backpack that’s white-knuckled but pretending to be casual. His grin is a centimeter away from a wild animal snarl.

Ryan throws a hand out elegantly. He’s not holding anything at all but he’s standing over the pile of water bottles like a protective dragon.

“Maybe you could take something a little less essential, I know how _flighty_ you can get,” Ryan says, voice so casual and endlessly cruel for it. Pete catches the aborted movement Dallon makes out of the corner of his eye, the curl of his hand into a fist.

“Of course, Ryan,” Brendon says sweetly and there’s poison in his voice Pete’s rarely had occasion to hear from him when it comes to anyone other than Ryan. “I’m sure you’d know best, we wouldn’t want my _personality_ causing any _trouble_.”

The smile Brendon turns on Ryan is thin-lipped and fake and cruel. Pete can read the resentment, the hurt and anger in his posture. Ryan just stares back, expression blank and mirror-smooth. It’s almost worse. It’s exactly what he’d been scared of, that the baggage would be too much, that they wouldn’t make it through the rest of the journey together.

“ _Or_ ,” Spencer snaps, shoving past Pete and pushing between them, breaking the silence, “We could stop using this as an excuse to measure dick size, how about _that_?”

No one says a word for a moment. Ryan’s mouth is open a little bit, Brendon blinking rapidly like he’d been slapped.

“So if you’re all done I’d like to fucking survive the next few days, so I think it’s time to calm the fuck down,” Spencer finishes, crossing his arms over his chest. 

It’s genuinely the funniest thing Pete’s ever seen, Spencer’s old bitchy stance and glare in the middle of the apocalypse. Apparently Brendon and Ryan don’t think so because they can’t meet Spencer’s eyes without going white.

The quiet that falls after is shamed and Pete has to bite down on a knuckle to avoid laughing out loud. Dallon doesn’t try, muffling his snickering badly in his sleeve. Ryan and Brendon can’t look at each other, turning to stare at anything that isn’t each other or Spencer. Brendon actually kicks his foot at the ground.

“Sounds good to me,” Dallon says when his laughter is under slightly better control. Pete chokes a little bit and stuffs another knuckle into his mouth to try and keep quiet. Spencer’s mouth is twitching madly, trying to hide his grin.

“Okay,” Brendon says faintly. Ryan doesn’t say anything at all, just stares down at the backpack in his hands, cheeks pink.

“Good,” Spencer huffs, trying for bitchy still. Pete gives in and sits down on the ground, laughing until Spencer grumbles and tips him over with a marginally gentle kick.

By the time Pete’s back under control Ryan and Brendon have filled all the backpacks with cans and bottles and supplies. Somehow they managed to do it all without getting within ten feet of each other, or even saying a word. Pete’s a little impressed.

The trees, when they finally shoulder their backpacks and step into the forest, are cool and dim. It’s a welcome respite from hot desert air and stale recycled air conditioning. Pete breathes it in deep, tastes damp earth and leaves. Everything is quiet but not still, leaves swaying gently in the soft currents of air. It’s good. Cleansing or something.

He points the way down the cracked road with a cheerful grin and starts walking.

Brendon, apparently recovered from Spencer’s yelling, bounces in and out of the trees. He barely seems to pay any attention to the pack on his back. Dallon watches him indulgently and offers the occasional interjecting comment in Brendon’s running dialogue about nothing in particular. Spencer’s mouth twists with aggravated distaste at the mud clinging to his shoes but he soldiers on regardless.

Ryan lags, staring blankly at the trees and clutching his guitar to his chest like it’ll protect him. Something about his posture makes Pete’s chest ache and he falls back to walk next to him. He keeps his eyes on where Brendon’s walking beside Spencer for the moment, waving a stick and talking a mile a minute about something to do with Harry Potter.

“It’s nice to see you still alive,” Pete says quietly. Ryan glances at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Same,” he says at last. He doesn’t continue and they walk in silence for a minute, Brendon’s voice echoing against the quiet trees, interrupted by an aggravated Spencer.

“How are you holding up?” Pete asks at last, shifting the weight of the pack on his back. There’s a can digging into his shoulder blade, right at the edge of the bone. 

Ryan shrugs.

“Well enough,” he says casually, and Pete hears the lie loud and clear. He doesn’t call him out, choosing instead to hum a little bit. It’s tuneless at first but melts into Saturday after a minute, morphs from there into Lullaby, and then without thinking into Nine in the Afternoon. He cuts off abruptly when Ryan snorts bitterly.

“Sorry, shit,” he says. Ryan shrugs.

“Could be worse,” he says bleakly. “At least they’re alive.”

Silence falls again. It’s a hard silence this time, Pete searching for the words to say to fix the damage he’d caused, Ryan’s face turned away ostensibly to watch the forest. It’s unpleasant, Pete had never dealt well with silence even at the best of times.

“Is Brendon alright?” Ryan asks at last. Pete turns to look at him. He’s still watching the forest, face hidden. His tone had been betraying, though. Pensive. A little bit regretful.

Pete considers lying. He doesn’t, out of courtesy and respect and a million other reasons. They’d been friends, once upon a time, for one. The clench in Ryan’s jaw when he mentioned Brendon’s name, for another.

“Not really. He’s pretty fucked up.” Pete pauses and considers. “No worse than anyone, I guess.”

Ryan exhales and looks up ahead, at where Brendon is trying to skip without dropping his backpack.

“It could be worse,” Ryan says at last. He sound shatteringly exhausted, suddenly, and Pete brushes a palm against his shoulder before he can think about it. Ryan flinches away, the strings of his guitar twanging gently. Pete jerks his hand back and rubs it on his pants unthinkingly.

He looks up ahead, to where the other three are.

Brendon is watching him and Ryan. Spencer has an arm around his shoulder but he’s twisted back to look, frozen mid-step. His face is shuttered, closed-off and blank, and he meets Pete’s eyes for a beat or two without blinking.

He turns back around and ducks out of Spencer’s hold, skipping up ahead to where Dallon is. He starts talking, fast and just on the far side of too quiet for Pete to make out the words. It sounds frantic.

Ryan’s shoulders are so tense when Pete looks over that his own muscles twinge in sympathy. He’s fingering the strings of his guitar, over and over. Pete’s not sure what he’s playing in his head. He’s not sure he has the _right_ to know.

He stares down at his feet and keeps putting one in front of the other.

+8+

Brendon finds the ruins of the house by falling into it.

It’s barely a three foot drop, since the debris of the two stories and the roof are mounded in the foundations, but it’s still startling to be walking by the side of the ruined road one moment and the next hear Brendon yelling with shock and pain but not be able to see him.

Pete freaks out. Just for a moment, a blackout moment he comes out of on the lip of the foundation, staring down at where Brendon’s sprawled on his stomach, coughing out curses. Ryan’s directly behind him, silent and stiff. Dallon and Spencer are right on his heels.

“Fucking ow,” Brendon complains and turns over, careful of his bruises and his backpack. Pete can’t see any blood blossoming between the flowers on his dress, just a couple of scuffs when he lifts his hands to examine them.

“You alright?” Pete asks. His voice is shaking. Brendon shakes his head once like he’s trying to knock his thoughts into order and looks up at them.

“I think I found a town,” he says. He sounds kind of bewildered.

They did find a town.

Pete can’t decide which of the tiny insignificant dots on the map it is and gives up after a minute anyway. He doesn’t give a fuck. It’s utterly ruined, the forest has grown up indiscriminately through it in an explosion of thick trunks and moss and underbrush. There’s not a single building standing, not even a single story. It’s deserted. Brendon disappears to explore it with Dallon in tow. 

He hasn’t said a word to Pete since morning but Pete can’t bring himself to be concerned. He’ll be forgiven eventually, when Brendon gets tired of holding onto his resentment. 

He wanders vaguely after them, leaving Spencer and Ryan to commune again. He needs to find a place for them to stop, what little light filters through the leaves of the trees is starting to turn pink and dim.

He chooses the basement of a house off the main street, one with a pile of rubble that looks more or less solid. It’s got enough of a dip that when Pete finally gets the fire started it’ll be mostly hidden from the surroundings.

Spencer cooks again, for a value of cooking that means he’s opening cans and setting them haphazardly close enough to the fire to heat them. Ryan sits next to him and picks out something tuneless on his guitar. Brendon and Dallon don’t come back until it’s dark, materializing quietly from between the dim trees and accepting the cans Spencer nudges over.

“There’s nothing but rubble here,” Brendon reports when he’s shoveled half a can into his mouth, not looking at Pete and addressing the fire instead. “Couldn’t even figure out what was a store and what was a house.”

Pete shrugs and tosses his empty can into the darkness.

“We’re not in desperate need of supplies yet or anything,” he says lazily and splays his legs out to catch as much warmth from the fire as he can. Brendon sneaks a look at him and Pete decides he’s probably mostly forgiven. 

“You should play something,” Dallon says unexpectedly and it takes Pete a second to realize he’s talking to Ryan. It takes Ryan a second too, if the way he blinks stupidly at Dallon for a few moments is any indication. He looks oddly vulnerable, like he’s hiding behind the wood of his acoustic.

“Sure,” he says at last. It takes him a moment, a couple of seconds strumming aimlessly before he nods to himself and starts to pick out a tune. Pete recognizes it nearly instantly and laughs a little.

The Beatles. Of course.

“ _When I find myself in times of trouble,_ ” he starts to sing, quietly and off-key. Spencer starts a beat with his palms on his thighs, smiling softly.

“ _Mother Mary comes to me,_ ” Brendon’s voice comes in unexpectedly. Pete loses the thread of the lyrics and sits back, listening to Brendon’s voice fill up the tiny campsite. It merges from one song to the next, ranges from the Beatles to Queen and back, until Brendon’s voice cracks and Ryan stops.

The fire crackles, accenting the silence.

“Thanks,” Ryan says after a moment. He sounds tired.

“No problem,” Brendon says. Pete catches the motion of Ryan nodding in the firelight and the flash of the guitar strings when he sets it aside.

No one says a word after that, settling down and letting the fire begin to die. Pete dozes, curled up facing the fire. The sound of breathing and the fire slowly collapsing and the trees moving quietly merge until Pete’s not sure what’s dreaming and what’s real.

He thinks the quiet noise of rustling clothe and rasping skin is a dream too, at first.

It takes him a while, maybe a couple of minutes, to drag himself up out of sleep and into something like awareness. The fire is low, just the embers and the occasional spit of flame, enough to illuminate the bowl of the basement rim and not much else. There’s a dim silver light filtering through the leaves of the trees, enough to tell Pete a couple of hours have passed.

He turns his head to see what made the sounds that woke him up.

Brendon is golden in the fading firelight, barely visible as a flash of forearm and jaw, the ripple of the back of his jacket, the shadows turning his hair into a dark silhouette. Dallon is a hint of darkness under him, softly illuminated cheekbones and the smallest shine of firelight reflected in his eyes. The most visible parts of him are his hands, one bleached white in the firelight and clutching Brendon’s hip, the other pinned to the ground under Brendon’s own.

It’s a study in frozen contrast and Pete can’t look away.

Brendon bends down and presses his lips to Dallon’s, once and then twice, by all appearances chaste and dry. It’s over so quickly Pete almost can’t believe it was real, until Dallon’s free hand comes up to tangle in Brendon’s dark hair and pull him down to press another kiss to Brendon’s mouth. It’s longer, turns filthy in seconds, the wet flash of tongue for a moment before they’re breaking apart again.

“Dal,” Brendon says quietly. Pete can barely hear it over the crackle of the fire. It’s almost a dream, itself.

Dallon doesn’t reply, pulling Brendon back down to kiss him again. They don’t stop, long moments of movement and light flickering over them. Pete can hear them a little bit over the fire, soft panting noises edging towards desperation.

He turns his head as quietly as he can. He’s half-hard, arousal pooling in the pit of his stomach, but it’s not for him to see.

Ryan is awake a few feet away.

His eyes are what catches Pete’s attention, shining with the firelight for a moment. His expression is blank but it’s impossible to mistake the direction he’s facing, watching Brendon and Dallon through the flames. Spencer is on his other side, fast asleep.

He glances over and catches Pete’s eye and they freeze for a moment. Across the fire Brendon breathes out a moan, low and barely audible over the crackle of the fire. Ryan’s eyes flicker sideways for a moment, over towards Brendon and Dallon, and when they flick back his expression is opaque. Brendon moans again, a trailing sound that could almost be Dallon’s name.

He holds Pete’s gaze for only a few moments before turning over to face Spencer and away from Pete. Pete watches his back for a while, the tense muscles and unforgiving lines. He falls back to sleep like that, to the soft sounds of Brendon and Dallon moving together and Ryan’s silence.

He dreams about the basement, except he’s there with Patrick.

+8+

The next morning Brendon’s eyes are bruised with lack of sleep but his expression is open and sweet and genuine. Dallon touches his wrist as they pack up their supplies. Pete only sees because he’s watching them, sees the way Brendon smiles, flashing and disappearing in moments. Dallon catches him looking and raises an eyebrow, something like a challenge and something like a question.

Pete shrugs and focuses back on his packing and when he looks back up Dallon is packing too, Brendon doing his level best to convince Spencer to give him a piggyback ride.

He’s still ignoring Pete, but he also keeps glancing to him with anxious speed and Pete’s pretty sure they’re going to be alright.

Ryan is sort of another problem. He’s refuses to look up from his shoes for the entire morning, barely saying a word to Spencer until Spencer had given up with a huff and walked off to give Brendon his piggyback ride. Ryan had watched him go with a shadowed expression that makes Pete slide up to walk next to him.

He means to say something reassuring, something nice to try to make everything better.

“You don’t have to be a dick,” he says instead. Ryan jolts and looks at him with an expression of blank shock.

“I’m not-,” he begins belatedly. Pete rolls his eyes impatiently.

“Whatever,” he sighs. “Just stop taking it out on Spencer, at least. He didn’t do anything.”

Ryan stares at him for a couple of steps until he stumbles over a rock and nearly falls over. He comes back up bright red and obviously reaching for composure. His guitar twangs mournfully.

“…Fine,” he says, cheeks reddening ever further. He glances at Pete sidelong again, expression turning appraising. “When made you all wise, anyway?”

Pete grins ruefully. He knows exactly what it was.

“Spencer kicked a conscience into me a while back,” he says, gesturing expansively like his words made any sense. Ryan nods anyway, mouth twisting ruefully.

“He has that effect on people,” he agrees.

Pete speeds up a few minutes later, passing Ryan to where Spencer is watching Brendon try to convince Dallon to carry him.

“Ryan wants to talk to you,” he mutters.

The look Spencer gives him is skeptical but he drops back to walk next to Ryan anyway. He doesn’t come back and when Pete looks back half an hour later they’re deep in conversation and Spencer is laughing. Ryan’s even smiling a little himself.


	5. Chapter 5

The morning of the third day following the road through the woods Pete makes everyone hand over their backpacks so he can take stock of their supplies. 

The backpacks are lighter than he’s comfortable with. Their food and water are dwindling rapidly, he discovers, and he packs them back up with quiet panic. 

They’ve been rationing the water carefully and no one complains, not even Brendon. They just eat and drink what they’re given when they stop and then pass out, too exhausted by the monotonous, endless walking to work up any complaints. Even Brendon is going quieter and quieter, ground down by physical exhaustion and too little food. 

Despite the rationing they’re running low. 

“We have to scavenge the next town we stop in,” he tells Spencer quietly. He’d been the only one to stay nearby, instead of taking the chance to rest in the grass beside the cracked pavement they’re walking on. 

“Thought so,” Spencer murmurs back. “Wanna tell the others what’s going on?” 

Pete contemplates the idea. Not that he thinks they would panic or do something stupid – despite himself he does trust them – but he doesn’t want to force them to deal with it until he has to. 

“Not yet,” he decides. Spencer nods thoughtfully and pastes on a smile when Brendon trots over to say hi – subdued, they’re all so tired, but still grinning sunnily.

+8+

The next town they find in the afternoon and it’s not quite as ruined as they’d come to expect. Some buildings are still standing, propped up by the trunks of the trees growing through them, and it had been big enough to support a little grocery store. Pete drops his backpack in the middle of the little clearing that used to be the town square and cracks his back painfully.

“We should scavenge while we have the chance,” he tells them cheerfully. 

“I call snooping through the houses,” Brendon announces instantly and takes off for the closest one at a near-sprint. Dallon follows him with a wry, long-suffering twist to his mouth. 

“I guess that leaves us with the store,” Pete says dryly to Ryan and Spencer. 

“Darn,” Ryan says tonelessly, and gracelessly drops his backpack next to Pete’s. Spencer set his down close by with much more care and then sighs, rubbing his eyes. 

“When we get to Chicago I’m gonna sleep for a week,” he says and squints at the building. “Let’s go get some food, I’m starving.” 

“Feel free to get a head start,” Ryan says dryly and Spencer flips him off without looking, squaring his shoulders and starting for the door. 

“Careful in there,” Pete says off-handedly, bending to riffle through his pack. He’s thirsty as hell, and they can spare a little water for now. 

He misses what happens next, but he hears it loud and clear. 

The sound of a building coming down is difficult to mistake for anything else. 

He jerks upright just in time to catch the shockwave of dust to the face. The roof is still sliding down into the building, sections of the walls toppling outwards under the force of it. Windows are shattering rapid-fire, exploding out in glittering, deadly shards, empty frames gushing dust and bits of plaster. Ryan screams, once, sharply, a noise of shock. 

The collapse slows, sagging support beams coming to rest. The building is barely standing anymore, more a shell of empty walls than anything else. Roofless, ruined, and Spencer is nowhere in sight. 

“ _Spencer_ ,” Ryan shrieks, voice buzzsaw-shrill. Pete has to grab him by the arm and wrench him around to stop him diving into the shifting rubble. 

“Not safe, fuck, Ryan! It’s not safe!” he shouts in Ryan’s ear, hauling back until Ryan pauses in his desperate attempts to elbow Pete away. He’s panting for breath, the air sobbing in and out of his lungs in gulping cries. Pete feels them like they’re his own breathing, sick and hurting in his ribcage because _Spencer_ , fuck, _Spencer_. 

“What happened?” Brendon skids to a halt next to them, Dallon right behind him, both white-faced and staring at the collapsing building. They have their bags in their hands still, but they hit the ground an instant later, spilling food and bottles of water across the ground. 

“Spencer,” Ryan croaks out and gestures helplessly at the building. He can’t say anything more, curls up on himself and slides right out of Pete’s grip to kneel on the ground. Like he can’t even keep himself up anymore. The noise he’s making is awful, quiet and animal. 

It’s Dallon that breaks for the building. 

Pete had thought it would be Brendon, had been ready to grab him if he’d made the attempt but he hadn’t been ready for Dallon, hadn’t _expected_ him to. Maybe he should have. Should have remembered that Dallon had nothing but Spencer until Brendon and Pete had shown up, despite the amount of time he spent with Brendon now. 

Brendon tackling him is the only thing that stops him before he can step into the still-shifting rubble, a headlong fall to the ground and then a short tussle that comes to a standstill with Brendon sitting on Dallon’s back, yelling incoherently. 

The building’s mostly fallen now, anyway, the only movement left the occasional sound of small pieces shifting. Pete listens and over the sound of Ryan, of Dallon and Brendon’s fight, he can’t make out a single sound. 

He can’t hear Spencer. 

Fear, sick and sharp and immediate. The knowledge that Spencer could be dead, more likely than not _is_. All of a sudden all Pete can hear is the roar of blood in his ears, not even Brendon and Dallon, not even Ryan’s quiet, awful keening. 

He stumbles past them and steps carefully over the pile of rubble that was the doorway Spencer had disappeared through. It shifts under his feet and he steadies himself mindlessly with a hand on what remains of the wall. 

The inside of the shop is a vista of destruction. There isn’t much left that’s recognizable, just plasterboard and plywood sprouting iron rebar and the occasional twinkle of glass or plastic. It’s still, utterly still, and Pete doesn’t see Spencer’s body. 

“Spencer?” he calls quietly. The only answer he gets is the clatter of the rubble shifting under his shoes and the absence of noise behind him. Ryan’s voice has cut off and Brendon and Dallon have finally stopped fighting. The loudest sound is the pounding of blood in his ears. 

More plasterboard shifts under his feet as he steps gingerly forward. It’s hard to move in, every step treacherous and threatening to send him sliding into the clusters of broken glass and rebar. Determinedly he makes his way further inside, one slipping footstep at a time. Judging by the noise of plywood creaking and clattering rubble Ryan’s followed him inside, and Dallon and Brendon. 

He nearly steps on Spencer. He only notices him in time because of how carefully he’s watching his feet and he recognizes at the last minute that the patch of oddly colored ground he’s been about to poke at gingerly is cloth and not a section of painted plasterboard. 

He drops to his knees, aware he’s shaking so hard he probably wouldn’t have been able to stand anyway, and starts to brush away the plaster. He tries to be gentle but he doesn’t think he succeeds, too frantic and scared. 

It’s a shoulder, warm and giving under Pete’ fingertips. The figure under the rubble is twisted, almost hidden, but it’s Spencer, definitely Spencer. 

“I found him!” Pete shouts across the piles of rubble and Ryan shouts back wordlessly. The sound of people trying to scramble across the shifting rubble fades into the background as Pete tries delicately to move the rubble away from Spencer’s face. 

He’s very quiet and his eyes are shut and he’s very still. He’s so still. Pete can’t tell if he’s breathing. 

There’s crimson blood on his mouth and nose, smeared across one cheek and mixing with gritty plaster dust into a muddy paste. More on his hands and elbows where they’re twisted across his chest, and the image slams into Pete of Spencer desperately trying to block the falling rubble, trying to shelter himself. Even more blood spreading across his shirt from the mess still covering his lower half. 

“Spencer,” Pete says, choking and sick, and paws clumsily at the pile of rubble. It smells of blood, blood and mildew. Coppery, acidic, sharp in the back of Pete’s throat, and Pete wonders distantly if he’s going to vomit. 

Spencer chokes out a groan, deep and sharply cut off by wet coughing. The relief rushes through Pete’s veins like heroin or meth, dizzying and giddy. 

Pete sits back gingerly, hands hovering over what he can see of Spencer’s body. He doesn’t know what to _do_ , and as he watches a bubble of bloody spit forms at the corner of Spencer’s mouth. 

Ryan skids to a stop next to him. Pete can hear Dallon and Brendon behind him, cursing and struggling through the rubble. 

“He’s alive,” Pete says belatedly, and Ryan collapses to his knees next to Pete like his strings were cut. He’s breathing like he’s run a marathon and he reaches out to touch Spencer’s cheek with fingers that tremble. 

“He’s not awake” Ryan says, voice a thread of sound, more exhalation than vocal cord. Brendon falls beside him, graceless, pressing mindlessly closer to Ryan in an effort to reach Spencer himself. He doesn’t seem to notice the proximity. 

Dallon is standing over them all when Pete looks up after him, watching Spencer’s labored, wet breathing. His eyes are wide and blank and his hands are trembling white fists at his side. 

“We have to get him out,” he says softly. Pete reaches out to touch his hand and it opens, twisting to clutch at Pete’s fingers with desperate strength. It telegraphs his shaking right through the both of them. 

Ryan’s the first one to reach out, prying free a corner of plasterboard as gently as he can. Brendon is helping him an instant later, gentle fingertips probing lose fragments of concrete. It takes Pete a moment to let go of Dallon’s hand and help. 

The four of them shift the rubble one painstaking inch at a time. Spencer doesn’t wake up the whole time, just keeps breathing, horrible and wet, and making the occasional pained noise. When they’ve finally shifted it all, what feels like an age later, there are wet tracks on Spencer’s cheeks from the corners of his eyes but he still hasn’t woken up. They hadn’t revealed anything obviously fatal at least, Pete tells himself. Nothing stabbed through his stomach or chest, no bones poking through the skin. 

The blood around his mouth is terrifying but Pete hopes it’s just a bitten cheek or fuck, even a broken nose. 

“Wait here,” he tells the group and makes his way back out of the rubble. He can breathe easier away from the tight air of the ruin, the oppressive fear lifting a little bit with a clear objective in mind. He grabs the bag with the first aid kit in it and spends a long moment just breathing, closing his eyes and steeling himself to go back in. 

Spencer looks just as bad as he had when Pete had left, pale and unmoving where he isn’t bright red with blood. The other three are silent, staring at Pete as he makes his way gingerly back. 

“We need to get him out of here,” Pete says, and Ryan stands up. 

“He’s not awake yet,” he says, voice tight and controlled. Pete breathes in against the sick feeling in his gut. 

“He might not wake up…” _ever_ , he thinks, “…for a really long time.” 

Ryan twitches and Pete reaches out without thinking. 

“I have to, I can’t,” Ryan says, arms lifting like he’s trying to block Pete from touching him. He’s backing away rapidly, breathing panicked and shallow, and he’s turning and dashing away before Pete can get a word out. 

Pete pauses for a moment, staring after him, and then turns helplessly to Brendon and Dallon. 

“I’ll go after him,” Brendon says, jaw flexing, and before Pete can stop _him_ he’s already gone. 

“I’ll keep them from killing each other,” Dallon says softly and climbs unsteadily to his feet. “Find us a place to stay for the night maybe.” He pauses by Pete’s shoulder, lacing his hands through the hair tufting up at the back of Pete’s head and tugging gently before making his way slowly after Brendon. 

Pete feels their absence intensely but he stays next to Spencer. He needs Pete more than the other three, probably needs all of them, needs more than that. Acutely he wishes he knew anything at all about first aid. That he’d paid more attention to the times when he’d injured himself and someone had to patch him up. 

It’s a few minutes before Spencer stirs, a few minute of Pete busying himself pulling out the first aid kit and looking at the supplies. He can’t stop wondering what they’d do if Spencer didn’t wake up at all. If they would stay or leave him behind or try to bring him with them. A few minutes of him tallying their supplies versus Spencer’s weight versus the distance they don’t know if they’ll have to walk. 

Fuck, Pete doesn’t think he _could_ convince Ryan to leave Spencer behind, much less Brendon. He doesn’t think he has it in him to try. 

Spencer’s wakening is heralded by a sharp increase in his breathing, a hacking cough trying to clear the wetness in his lungs. He slits his eyes open next, goes to lift an arm and then winces and stills. His eyes are hazy when he turns them on Pete, absent and barely focusing. 

The relief is still a heroin rush. As much as when Spencer had proven to be alive. 

“Pete,” Spencer says, or tries to. He’s interrupted by a wet cough that sprays more bloody spit over his lips. It doesn’t seem to be getting to be more blood than saliva, at least, and Pete thanks god for small mercies. He couldn’t do a thing to save Spencer from a punctured lung, not a _thing_. 

“You’re good, Spence, we got you free,” Pete says softly. Spencer nods shallowly, a soft bob of his head that still whitens his cheeks with pain. 

“Hurts,” he gets out through gritted teeth. 

“Fuck, I know,” Pete says and pushes Spencer’s dirty hair back from his forehead. “We have some Advil, I think? It won’t help much but it’s something.” 

“Fuck, whatever,” Spencer hisses. “Anything.” 

Sitting Spencer up is a practice in trying to avoid the worst of Spencer’s bruises and failing. He bears up stoically enough, only wincing twice, but the tension of his back under Pete’s hand and the flex of his jaw muscles are too telling. He doesn’t relax when he’s upright either, sitting gingerly and moving with great care. 

Pete shakes two pills out of their little bottle of Advil and stares at them for a moment before shaking out two more and handing them over with a bottle of water pulled from the backpack next to him. Spencer takes them with a grateful noise. 

“I feel like this is more than the recommended dose,” he jokes hoarsely, rattling the pills in his hand. Pete grins wryly. 

“I don’t think it’s gonna be liver damage that kills any of us,” he says without thinking. He almost regrets the words but Spencer barks out a laugh that has him wincing a second later so he figures he’s okay. Spencer takes the pills with a gulp of water and a face before settling gingerly back against the pile of rubble. 

“Where are the others?” he asks quietly a beat of silence later.

Pete shrugs and busies himself with shuffling through their meager first aid supplies out of the backpack. There’s some gauze and some band-aids, and a tiny tube of antibiotic ointment. He hesitates for a moment, hands hovering over Spencer’s tattered and bloodstained jeans, before Spencer grunts in annoyance and pushes them gingerly down his hips and off. His legs are pale where there aren’t blooming bruises or bloody, smeared cuts. 

“Sent them to look for a place to sleep,” Pete says, getting to work taping the worst cuts he finds, spreading a thin layer of antibiotic over each one. He’s getting blood and dust and splinters all over his fingers and he wishes he could spare the water to wash the injuries. “We’re not moving on till tomorrow at least.” 

Spencer hisses out a breath when Pete’s fingers brush over the largest cut, long and lengthwise across his left thigh. 

“We’re gonna have to move on soon anyway,” Spencer says, breathless and sweaty with pain. “We can’t stay, we don’t have the supplies.” 

“You’re in pain,” Pete argues hopelessly. He knows Spencer’s right, he just… he wants to stop Spencer’s pain. He wants to give Spencer time to heal, for them all to heal from the shock of nearly losing him. They just don’t have the _time_. 

“I’ll be in pain tomorrow, and the day after, and probably months from now, fuck.” Spencer’s voice cracks, just once. “I’d rather not starve to death.” 

Pete sighs and palms his face. “A fair point.”

Spencer’s hand catches Pete’s wrist. His grip is weak and shaking but undeniable, insistent. 

“We’re gonna be fine,” he says gently, and Pete has to laugh because. Jesus, only Spencer would think to reassure someone while in so much pain he can’t stop his hands from shaking. He shuffles Spencer’s hand back into his lap and nudges his knee where it’s least bruised, smiling crookedly. 

“We are,” he agrees, not sure if he’s lying. Spencer smiles anyway. 

“We found a place,” Brendon’s voice comes from over Pete’s shoulder. When Pete turns to look at him he’s hovering at the edge of the rubble, fidgeting with the edge of his dress. It’s got blood on it – some of it is Spencer’s, Pete realizes dully – and he’s focused more on picking at it than on the two of them. Ryan’s standing beside him, head tilted down, deadly still. 

“Bren,” Spencer says, “Ryan.” 

Brendon glances at him quickly before looking back down. He’s pale. Not as pale as Spencer, but his face is wan and drawn. Ryan doesn’t look up at all. 

“Hi, Spence,” Brendon says to his shoes. Ryan still doesn’t say a word. Pete glances back at Spencer, catches the way he’s watching the two of them wistfully. 

“You should help me get him up, you two,” he says quickly and ignores the panicked glance Brendon sends his way. Ryan’s head jerks up and he meets Pete’s eyes for an agonized second before nodding silently and stepping over. 

This close he can’t avoid looking at Spencer, a slow once-over that leaves him paler and paler with every inch. It’s not pretty, what isn’t covered by the remaining filthy bloodstained clothing is bloody and bruised and dirty. Brendon looks a little green when he belatedly manages his way over. 

“You don’t look so good, Spence,” Brendon says with a fake little snort of laughter. 

“Don’t feel so good, B,” Spencer replies dryly and gestures imperiously. “Am I getting moved or what? You guys are a shitty taxi service, lemme tell you.” 

It’s a close thing but Spencer doesn’t cry out once as they’re getting him upright. Sitting him back up is hard, and risky – Pete’s pretty sure Spencer doesn’t have a spinal injury but _maybe_ – and it doesn’t get any easier to get him to his feet. By the end Brendon and Ryan are almost literally carrying him, feet barely brushing the ground.

Spencer settles his weight on his right foot first, slowly, and then the left. He gets about halfway through that before grunting, drawing his left foot back off the ground and leaning back precariously on Ryan. 

“I think there’s something wrong with my foot,” he says tersely, and his eyes when he meets Pete’s gaze are panicked. Pete runs a hand through his hair, trying to think through the fear. 

“Can you walk on it?” he asks. Spencer sets his foot back on the ground and slowly puts weight on it. His face goes paler and paler and his teeth sink viciously into his lower lip but he doesn’t make a sound. 

“I have to,” he says after a moment, which isn’t the answer Pete wants to hear or even a very reassuring one, but will have to be enough. 

“We’re giving you the lightest backpack,” Pete says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and staring at the little pile of supplies he’d unpacked from his backpack so he doesn’t have to look at Ryan, at Brendon, at anything about the situation. The pile is too _small_ , they didn’t even get what they needed, they have even less than when they started, _fuck_. “And you’re gonna tell us if you need to rest. No fucking martyrdom from you, Spencer Smith.”

“Wouldn’t dream of taking your place,” Spencer says sweetly. He’s smiling, thin and shaky but genuine, when Pete looks at him reflexively. Pete grins back and flips him off. 

“Fuck you,” he says, and crouches to start shuffling things back into his backpack.

+8+

It takes them two more days to get through the woods and Pete spends every moment fighting back panic.

Spencer moves slowly, pale with pain most of the time, swallowing their dwindling supply of painkillers with veiled desperation. Ryan and Brendon seem to have settled for taking turns helping him along, handing across heavier loads without a word but also without any animosity. Dallon spends most of his time in silence, watching the three of them blankly and avoiding Pete’s eyes easily. 

Pete almost doesn’t believe it when he notices the gaps of light on the ground where there are breaks in the leaves start to grow. When the light filtering between the trees starts to grow and grow until the trees are so thin that the road is almost smooth enough to drive on. 

The trees end just as abruptly as they had started, almost a week ago. A ruler-straight line between thick, ancient-looking trunks and grassy shrubland, a highway scattered with cars, and Pete steps out into the blazing sunlight with a breath of relief that reaches the very bottom of his lungs. The dry air feels like as much of a blessing as the damp forest air had, before. 

The horizon is almost completely clear. Almost completely. 

Chicago is a glittering monument on the horizon and Pete exhales so long he gets a little lightheaded. He’d recognize that skyline anywhere. 

He hadn’t even known how scared he was that he’d come out of the trees to find the earth had swallowed Chicago, or that it would be nothing but ashes, or that any of a million things would have happened to it to destroy it completely. That he wouldn’t even have bodies to mourn. 

“Chicago,” he says and his voice cracks. Ryan brushes his shoulder with his own silently. 

“Let’s go,” Spencer says grimly. He’s white-faced, obviously in pain, but he nudges Brendon away from where he’s hovering at Spencer’s shoulder and walks past them without flinching. “We gotta find a car to steal. I’m not fucking walking all the way there.” 

Finding a car takes them less than an hour, before Brendon points out a car abandoned by the side of the road, shining key hanging from the ignition. It starts with a sputter and the gas tank is half-empty but Pete figures they can make it to Chicago on that. If not, they’ll find something else. 

Spencer climbs into the passenger seat with white-faced relief, setting his foot on the dashboard and massaging his ankle slowly. Brendon, Dallon, and Ryan cram into the backseat with no complaints. Pete climbs into the driver’s side with a sick sort of déjà vu. 

There’d been no discussion this time either. Just the assumption that Pete would drive. 

He starts the car anyway. 

The drive to Chicago takes the rest of the day and then some. They don’t bother looking for a place to sleep, instead taking it in turns in the front seats and letting Spencer stretch out in the back. It’s a testament to how much pain he’s in that he hadn’t complained about it, instead settling into a restless, exhausted sleep as soon as his head had hit seat cushion. 

Pete passes out easily, letting Dallon take the first watch. He’s too exhausted by the walk, by the pain and worry. The insomnia doesn’t have the time to get its claws into him. 

He’s almost grateful, even though he spends the whole last watch until dawn staring at the dark hulk of Chicago on the horizon, wondering, wondering. 

He starts driving when the sun has risen to just above the horizon. The other three wake up one at a time and settle into their seatbelts and watch Chicago approaching wordlessly.

+8+

The streets of Chicago are full of corpses.

They’re rotting fast, and covered in swathes of browning blood. Pete doesn’t look at them. They’re not important, and he’s getting really good at blocking out the things he doesn’t want to see. Of the other four, only Brendon seems really affected. 

Dallon looks numb. Spencer is too busy trying not to pass out from the pain. Ryan is… being Ryan, impenetrably. Brendon, on the other hand, looks increasinglysick with every time he chances a glance out the window. Eventually he stops looking, staring down at his blanket and picking idly at the patches of stains. 

The center of Chicago proper is empty of everything except the dead, which Pete had expected. There’s no sign of what had caused it, which he hadn’t. Just the corpses and vast pools of dried blood. 

He doesn’t think Patrick or the others would stay in downtown Chicago, anyway. If they were still alive. 

If. 

Pete backs out of Chicago, tries his damnedest not to drive over the dead, and breathes. He can feel the air move in and out of his lungs, in cool dry bursts. He can feel them drying out his mouth. He knows his chest is moving. He doesn’t know why it doesn’t feel like the oxygen is getting through. 

Dallon leans forward from the backseat and puts his hand on his shoulder and Pete keeps driving. The suburbs have less dead in them, just like in Vegas, but they seem to have died slower too. Several of them had left thrashing trails of blood down the street or against the walls of their homes. Some of them weren’t adults. Some of them weren’t alone. 

Pete keeps driving. 

When he reaches the crossroads in the suburbs where he has to choose between going to Patrick’s, Andy’s, or Joe’s he stops the car entirely and puts his head in his hands. No one says a word until he finally pull his head up and scrubs his hands through his hair, sharp with frustration. 

“Where are we going?” Ryan asks. Spencer punches him in the shoulder. 

“Patrick’s,” Pete decides blankly. 

He doesn’t want to, which is how he knows he should. He wants to drive around aimlessly forever until the world _really_ ends, until the decision is taken from his hands. But he knows he’s just avoiding the inevitable and Pete is nothing if not an old hand at yanking off band-aids, so. 

He throws the car into drive and follows the familiar roads towards Patrick’s house. 

The familiarity of the roads keeps him from noticing, at first. He’s making a concerted effort to avoiding looking at the corpses, which also helps. He doesn’t want to see the faces of people he may know, people he may have grown up with, people he’d passed a million times in the street on the way to band practice. 

So he doesn’t notice when the corpses just… stop showing up. 

The blood is still there but the corpses aren’t, are conspicuous in their absences. There’s not a one and Pete doesn’t know what that means. 

He knows what he hopes. He just doesn’t know if it’s _sure_. 

The way up to Patrick’s has his hands tightening so much on the wheel that his knuckles start to ache. No one mentions it, the car totally silent, and Pete wishes desperately and suddenly for a radio to interrupt the silence. Something to make it so he doesn’t feel the responsibility to fill the empty air. 

Spencer puts his hand on Pete’s shoulder when they pull up to Patrick’s house, squeezing lightly before starting the arduous process of climbing out the vehicle. The other three scramble out to help him, leaving Pete in the car, staring up at Patrick’s house. 

It seems untouched. 

There’s a pool of blood on the sidewalk but nothing on the driveway or the walkway to the door. There’s no light in the windows but there wouldn’t be, would there, not in the bright late-afternoon sun. There’s no sign at all that there could be anyone home. Anyone alive. 

He climbs out and nearly passes out when he stands up. It’s only luck that no one sees and he climbs the steps to Patrick’s porch barely able to breathe. He knocks on Patrick’s door with his heart in his mouth and a sense of déjà vu that has him a little sick to his stomach. 

There’s a long pause of silence and the innocuous noises of the wind in the trees and it’s torture. Absolutely agony. 

He hears someone walking cautiously down the hall and he takes a breath because maybe, _maybe_. 

“Who’s there?” he hears them call. 

It’s Joe. 

He’d recognize that voice anywhere. Pete nearly starts crying right there, right on Patrick’s porch. He can’t keep up with his own thoughts, the relief in _thank god Joe’s alive_ , the fear in _but where’s Patrick and Andy_ , none of it. He has to haul in two shaking breaths before he can answer. 

“It’s Pete,” he calls, voice breaking. He hears someone swearing in shock on the other side of the door – Andy? maybe, god, Pete hopes so – and the door is hauled open. 

“Pete,” says Joe, blank with shock. 

He’s disheveled, filthy, hair a monstrous creature threatening to eat his head, and he’s gloriously, beautifully alive. Andy’s standing at his shoulder, the exact same. Pete feels his eyes brim and overflow and he doesn’t know what his expression is doing. It feels painful. 

Joe watches him with his mouth open. Pete doesn’t bother to wipe off his cheeks, just lets the silence go for a second until the scant tears have stopped and then coughs, shaking his head. It’s still silent. 

“Spencer needs to sit down and like, a doctor,” Pete says at last. 

Joe blinks and looks past him at last. 

“Holy shit, Brendon?” he says, and his voice cracks a little bit. He gestures them inside and Brendon and Ryan file in, helping Spencer along as much as he’ll let them, Dallon carrying everyone’s backpacks behind them. Joe follows them a few feet down the hall, looking back over his shoulder at Pete as he goes. 

Andy still hasn’t moved. 

“Hi,” Pete says faintly. His voice isn’t working right, all of a sudden. 

Pete watches his hands flex once. Curl into white-knuckled fists, shaking against his thighs. His expression is blank, though. Totally blank. 

“Andy?” Pete asks and steps forward, holding out a hand out hopelessly. Andy flinches with his whole body, head turning sharply away. 

“ _No_ ,” he says once, abruptly. 

There’s no give in his voice, not even a little bit. He spins in the doorway and stalks back out of sight, into the gloomy bowels of the house. 

“Andy!” Pete calls and goes to run after him. Joe catches him by the shoulder, pulling him up short. 

“Not a good idea,” he warns, and there’s something in his eyes that makes the advice stick. Something sharp and un-Joe-like. Put there by the end of the world, Pete thinks, and his ass hits the ground with startling suddenness. 

He buries his face in his knees and laughs and laughs. 

Patrick is standing in the doorway this time, when Pete finally pulls his head up. Joe is gone, probably after Andy, maybe to check on the others. He’d tried to talk to Pete for a while but apparently had given up after a while, when Pete just couldn’t stop the hysterical laughter. Pete can’t blame him. 

His cheeks are hot and wet but he can breathe again, mostly. He’s managed to pull the laughter back, into nasty little chuckles that bubble up rarely but still wrack his ribcage. 

“Patrick,” he says, and Patrick walks over to sit heavily on the ground next to him. He’s quiet for a long time. 

“So you’re alive,” he says at last. His voice is impossible to read, for once. The sound of it breaks Pete open along fault lines he hadn’t even known were there. He puts his head back down on his knees and tries his damnedest to breathe. 

“I am,” he gets out when he’s got himself more or less back under control. It’s all he can get out, because Patrick is staring at him with big, dark eyes when he turns his head on his knees to look over. 

Patrick looks like hell, hair as greasy and dirty as all of theirs have become, as in need of a shave as Pete’s ever seen him. There’s a shadow of an old bruise on one cheekbone and the different bruises of sleeplessness ringed under his eyes. He’s visibly thinner too, _unhealthily_ , and Pete _aches_. He hopes Patrick hasn’t been rigging the rations, banking on his own body holding out longer than anyone else’s. 

Patrick would, the selfless bastard. 

“I was going to go after you, in another week,” Patrick says. Softly, like a confession. Like there’s anything unusual about going on an odyssey across the desert for loved ones, on the dream they’re still alive. Pete refrains from telling him every person he’s met so far had been doing that exact thing. 

“You don’t have to, now,” Pete supplies with a watery smile. Patrick nods seriously. He hasn’t blinked, just staring at Pete with blank, dark eyes. 

He doesn’t say anything. Stares at Pete like his face is a math problem he wants to solve, a prickly riff he has to nail down perfectly. 

“You hear from any other survivors?” Pete asks, for something to say mostly. He can’t keep his eyes off of Patrick’s and it’s an honest struggle to keep his hands in his lap. He’s been spoiled by Brendon, Spencer, Dallon, their easy acceptance of skin-to-skin contact and shared space. His hands itch to brush against the patchy stubble on Patrick’s jaw. Just to be _sure_. 

Patrick tilts his head, considering Pete’s question. 

“Some. There's some kids we heard from in Ohio, they're holed up there with a couple other people. They hooked up one of those trucker transmitters to a satellite dish, I don't know how,” Patrick muses. “They do a radio broadcast every now and then. The one that talks the most doesn't sound totally sane, he keeps going on about his car radio being stolen.” 

He hesitates and glances away for a moment, secretive like he thinks Pete won't catch him at it. 

“He reminds me of you a little,” Patrick mutters. 

“Nice,” Pete says with a broken laugh, “Lump me in with the crazy, I know how it is-,” 

“Not like that, asshat,” Patrick interrupts, rolling his eyes imperiously. It gets Pete low in the gut, the familiarity of the expression, that he has Patrick, that he’s _here_. “Just, you know. Eloquent.” 

Pete grins at that one, a little honest smile he hasn’t had occasion to feel on his own face for a while. Patrick glances at him sidelong and Pete starts to reach out to nudge at his shoulder – some physical contact, grounding, a fragment of cynical thought in _verification_. 

Patrick jerks his head away and stares down at his knees. Pete’s hand stutters and falls back to the floor. His chest is aching, sharp and sour. 

“Mark Hoppus drove through,” Patrick says after a beat. “With Travis.” 

Pete looks up, startled. Patrick is watching him with a smile that’s mostly genuine, just a shadow of something Pete doesn’t recognize in the corner of his mouth. Gratefully Pete takes the out. 

“Not Tom?” he asks. Patrick shrugs. 

“They were looking for him. Mark said something about aliens, something like-,” Patrick frowns for a moment, remembering, before grinning again, sharp and amused. “Like, ‘if that fuckhead got himself abducted for a giggle I’m putting an alien up his asshole’.” 

Pete laughs so hard he starts coughing and has to put his head between his knees again. 

“Sounds like Mark,” he gasps out when he can finally come up for air. “He’s got a fuckin’ way with words, man.” 

“Kinda poetic,” Patrick agrees. 

“Christ, of all the people to survive an apocalypse,” Pete says with a sigh, letting his knees fall open and head tilt back against the wall. He’s trying to imagine Mark driving across the country, Travis in tow. It’s a surprisingly hilarious thought and he snickers again, under his breath. 

The silence stretches out with no response from Patrick and Pete glances over lazily. He’s not expecting Patrick to be so close, to be staring so hard, but there he is, a foot away, watching Pete with wide, dark eyes. He jolts a little in surprise. 

He watches his own hand come up, dreamlike, to rest on Patrick’s cheek. 

Under Pete’s fingertips Patrick’s skin is rough, stubble scratching at his skin, burningly warm and real. He can feel the flex of Patrick’s jaw muscles tightening, the sudden tension in him telegraphing through his skin. 

Patrick’s hand comes up, hovering over Pete’s where it’s resting on his cheek. It’s radiating heat just like the rest of him and Pete feels his skin prickle in response. The silence is dragging, second by second. 

“Are you guys okay?” Joe asks awkwardly from the door, and Patrick jerks away from Pete’s touch like he’d been burned, on his feet and backing away in an instant. Pete belatedly scrambles to his feet, reaching out desperately and catching Patrick by the sleeve. They’re frozen in place for a long beat. 

He chokes. He doesn’t say a word, stares Patrick in the face with his mouth open and nothing comes out. 

“Fine,” Patrick says although he sounds anything but, and sends a grim smile Pete’s way. “I’ll see you later, Pete.”

He slips past Joe and out of sight, though his hurried footsteps echo a long time. Pete stares after him. 

“That wasn’t… That wasn’t right, that wasn’t what I wanted,” he mumbles numbly. Joe’s hand lands on his arm, cool and grounding. It’s comforting, exactly what Pete needs. 

“You're gonna have to give him time,” Joe advises. “We all thought you were dead, having you back is a lot to take in on top of, you know.” 

_The stuff about the end of the world,_ Pete fills in mentally. It's a thorny thought, one part anger and resentment to two parts regret. 

“Common theme these days,” he says instead, and then flicks away the heavy thoughts with a wave of his hand. “You’re taking this all kind of well.” 

Joe laughs sardonically, shaking Pete’s a little bit by the hand still on his arm. It’s still not quite Joe from before, happy-go-lucky and kind, but it’s infinitely better then Andy’s outright rejection or Patrick’s refusals. Pete leans into it desperately. 

“Gotta learn to roll with the punches, my man,” Joe tells him philosophically, adjusting his arm to wrap around Pete’s shoulders. “I knew you couldn’t be dead, not Pete Wentz.” 

“Thanks dude,” Pete says with a nearly genuine smile. “How's the apocalypse treating you?” 

Joe pauses for a moment of deep contemplation, thumbing at his chin. His afro quivers in thought. 

“Kind of a bummer,” he pronounces eventually. “Could definitely be better.” 

“Six out of ten, gold star for effort?” Pete suggest with a snort. 

“I mean, come on,” Joe says, nodding in agreement. “There aren't even any zombies or like, badass plants.” 

Pete pauses, reminded of Ryan’s map suddenly. The little city labeled with a smudged _zombies_. 

“Actually...” He says slowly. Joe's eyes widen. 

“You're _kidding_ ,” he breathes. 

“We're gonna have to talk to Ryan,” Pete says and bounces out of Joe’s hold, suddenly energized. “Come on, I haven't had a chance to ask him yet.”

+8+

“They were pretty shitty zombies,” Ryan tells them thoughtfully when they find him to ask him about it. He’d been holed up alone in the front room, sorting through a pile of loose clean clothing for something in his size. “Really slow, and they didn’t do much when you knocked them over except thrash around.”

“No acid spitting, nothing cool like that?” Joe asks, sounding ridiculously disappointed. Ryan eyes him a little bit. 

“Nah. I got the feeling that wasn’t what killed that city but I didn’t really stick around.” 

“Killed the city,” Pete echoes thoughtfully. It sounds right, a decent way of putting what had happened. That every city they’d been through had been killed. 

“I’ve been meaning to ask, actually,” Ryan says to Joe. “What happened here? The buildings all look fine.” 

Joe runs a hand through his hair and sighs, long and quiet. 

“The air turned poison,” he says at last, eyes far away and blank. “It burned when you breathed it and then you bled a lot and then you died. I don’t know, I was in my music room. People that were inside didn’t get the worst of it.” 

“Fuck,” Pete says and Joe looks at him, a crooked smile on his face. 

“Yeah,” he says and shrugs. “I put in my headphones so I guess I just didn’t hear the noise thing everyone’s talking about. I called Patrick when everything settled down and then we went and found Andy. It wasn’t so bad.” 

Not compared to everything that could have happened, Pete knows. 

“Still,” he says weakly and looks down at his shoes. 

“I heard Vegas got hit pretty bad,” Joe says mercifully. “But I didn’t hear anything about LA, what went down for you guys?”

+8+

Pete knows how stubborn Andy can be so he expects it to take a few days for him to calm down enough to talk. He’s resigned to it, though he misses Andy so much it aches. He has Joe, who’s acting the most normal, and Patrick, who at least talks to him even if it feels the farthest thing from normal.

He rolls out of bed every morning expecting it to be the backseat of a car and has to spend a few minutes reminding himself he has nowhere to be, anymore. The most urgent thing about life now is the trips out to the surrounding buildings to clear them of useable supplies, and even then the worst thing they encounter are rotting corpses. Pete’s getting to be an old hand at sliding by them with a bare glance, avoiding all details about who they might have been. 

Regardless of all that, when Andy finds him in the kitchen poking at an unappetizing bowl of cold canned pasta it’s a hell of a surprise. 

He coughs a bit to get Pete’s attention, hovering awkwardly by the door. Pete jerks to his feet in shock. Andy shakes his head and gestures Pete to sit back down. Pete leans back hesitantly against the edge of his chair, not quite sitting. 

“I’ve been told I might have been a bit of a dick,” Andy says after a brief silence, clearing his throat. 

Pete has to laugh. 

“It’s okay,” he says, “you kind of have an excuse.” 

“Not really,” Andy says. He hesitates for a moment and then reaches out, yanking Pete roughly into a hug. 

He smells pretty rank, sweat and dirt and the same smell they all have, unwashed human, but it feels amazing. Pete clings desperately for a long time, only letting his hands loosen when his heart has slowed to almost a normal pace. 

“We’re good?” he asks, a little bit of bravado but mostly the need for reassurance. 

“Great,” Andy replies with conviction. He’s smiling when Pete pulls back, bright and honest and Pete reminds himself he’s not supposed to be crying. It mostly works. 

Andy pauses. 

“I thought you were dead,” he says. His face is shuttered as he says it. “When I saw you I was… I got so _angry_. I don’t know why.” 

“I’m sorry,” Pete says helplessly. Andy snorts. 

“Yeah, apologizing for being alive,” he says. “How dare you. I’m the one who should apologize.” 

“Shut up,” Pete says, laughing a little bit. “I forgive you, anyway.”

+8+

They’re sitting in the living room, Joe and Andy and Pete, and Brendon and Spencer and Dallon too. Brendon has a battered acoustic and so does Joe and they’re playing at each other, jamming and trying to trip each other up in equal measure. Pete’s idly pulling loose threads from the ends of his shorts, listening and cheering them on and trying to ignore how restless he feels.

He’d toyed with the idea of leaving, the other day. Getting into the car and driving out to, fuck, somewhere. Downtown maybe, honk his horn a few times to see if there was anyone else lurking in the silent, abandoned structures. Further afield, maybe out into the suburbs. 

He hadn’t, but it’d been more out of respect for the others than anything. 

He’s shaken from his thoughts by Ryan’s arrival. It’s quiet, and it takes a while for the other to notice, but something about Ryan’s fidgeting, uncomfortable posture captures and keeps Pete’s attention. He’s alternating staring at Spencer and at Brendon, expression unreadable. 

Eventually Brendon and Joe pause to argue about something, some small detail about the fingering on a particular song, and Ryan coughs to get their attention. 

“I’m leaving,” Ryan says when they all have their eyes on him. His tone is light, almost conversational. 

There’s a long beat of silence, shocked and empty. Pete isn’t breathing. He doesn’t think anyone else is either. 

“What,” Spencer says at last. His voice is quiet and soft and absolutely deadly. Ryan flinches at his tone, just a little bit, the lightest twitch of his head. He’s still again almost instantly, however, the emptiest of curves at the corners of his mouth. 

“Jon’s out there,” he says simply. Spencer breathes out a thin hiss but doesn’t respond. 

Joe and Andy exchange looks, thick with meaning, and Pete feels sickness gathering in his gut. A premonition of what that means. 

“We never found him,” Joe says at last, tone infinitely gently. “I mean, we didn’t find his body either. But we went looking and he’s… he’s not there.”

Ryan shakes his head. 

“I have to look,” he says, tone unchanged. He’s not meeting Joe’s eyes, not paying any attention to anyone around him. His gaze has shifted outwards, into the middle distance. It’s terrifying in its blankness. 

Joe hesitates and then throws up his hands, sighing tiredly. 

“It’s your life,” he directs over his shoulder, turning and walking away, Andy in tow. His shoulders are pulled in tight and Pete’s tempted to go after him, to talk him out of whatever funk has its claws in him. It’s only the sudden, awkward silence of the room that stops him. 

The thick tension of Brendon and Spencer and Ryan, the way that not a single one of them is moving, that they’re barely even _breathing_. 

“Spencer,” Ryan says, breaking the silence, voice still curiously conversational despite the fact he hasn’t lifted his head. 

Spencer is frozen in space for a moment, a perfectly balanced point between Ryan and Brendon. Brendon, who is staring at him with the sort of exhausted resignation Pete’s never seen on him before. Ryan, who can’t look at anything but his feet. Tiny despite himself, hunched into a series of pathetic angles. 

For once Dallon is silent, watching the trio with something Pete can’t decipher in his eyes. He’s obviously not going to help, not this time. Pete lurches forward to try to defuse what he can of the situation. 

“You should stay,” Ryan croaks unexpectedly. It freezes Pete in place, shatters the delicate silence and Spencer and Brendon both stare, open-mouthed. 

Ryan looks up with a crooked, hurting grin. 

“It’s cool. I’ll be fine, Spence, I always am,” he says. It kicks Pete right in the chest. 

Spencer moves fast, hobbles over with a storm on his face like he’s going to punch Ryan, a familiar expression of anger and frustration and violent intent. Ryan watches him come with a resigned expression. He doesn’t look surprised, exactly, when Spencer folds him into a hug instead. A little pleased, a little heartbroken. 

“You’re a shitwad Ryan, I fucking hate you,” Spencer hisses out, voice fucked up and thick like he’s fighting back tears. Pete looks away but a little too late not to see Spencer’s face when he comes back up, fierce and bright-eyed and warlike. 

“Love you too, asshole,” Ryan says with a giggle that’s maybe real. 

“You’re coming back,” Spencer says, insists. 

“You better fucking believe it,” Ryan swears, and scrubs his hand through Spencer’s disgusting hair. “Fuck, I’m gonna miss you.” 

Pete walks away before he can hear any more. 

He snags Brendon by the hand as he goes. Brendon grabs Dallon and they shuffle out into the hall in an awkward line, Spencer and Ryan fading into the incoherent rise and fall of voices. 

Brendon tucks himself into Dallon’s side as soon as they’re clear, breathing in deep, forced-even pants that betray the fear in his eyes. Dallon’s face is still oddly blank, though there’s something moving beneath the mask that Pete kind of recognizes. Selfish gladness, maybe. He knows that one very well. 

“Spencer is staying,” Pete says softly. 

Brendon lifts his head to meet Pete’s head and his eyes are cold and bleak. Clear of even any pretense of ignorance. 

“Was he going to, though?” he asks softly. Pete can’t answer for a long moment. His chest is constricting, sympathetic pain at the loneliness that Brendon’s face betrays. He has to clear his throat a couple of times to answer. 

“Spencer wouldn’t leave you,” Dallon says unexpectedly. 

Brendon twists, looking up at him with something like desperate hope.

“He was going to ask me to go with him to look for you if you hadn’t shown up, in Vegas,” Dallon continues, mouth quirking a little. “I could tell.” 

“Dal’s not wrong,” a voice croaks from the door. Brendon jerks upright in Dallon’s grip, eyes widening. 

Spencer coughs nervously from the doorway. He’s watching Brendon with huge eyes, young-looking for the first time Pete can remember in recent memory. His hands are in his pockets and there’s no mistaking his posture for anything but a desperate attempt to look casual. 

“I mean, you’re kinda important to me,” he says when no one responds. He’s slowly going red under their combined stares. “Or something, I don’t know.” 

“Spencer,” Brendon begins, and then can’t continue, mouth working like he’s going to speak and nothing coming out. 

“You didn’t ask me to stay with you, Bren,” Spencer reminds him. His hands flex in his pockets like he’s thinking about pulling them out but he doesn’t, just stares at Brendon desperately. 

“I was gonna let you choose,” Brendon tells Dallon’s feet. He determinedly doesn’t look up and misses the incredulous look Spencer gives him. “Like, you guys are best friends.” 

“You’re a fucking idiot,” Spencer says and hobbles over. Brendon looks up at the motion and when he sees Spencer coming surges away from Dallon momentarily to grab and haul him forward. The hug he pulls Spencer into looks more like a death-grip, white-knuckled and shaking. The force of his pull topples them back into Dallon a little. He braces them against the wall and hesitantly reaches out to brush careful fingers through filthy hair. 

“You were gonna let me choose, Brendon, what the _fuck_.” Spencer sounds breathless. 

Brendon laughs and it’s everything it hadn’t been moments ago, bright and giddy and happy. 

“Of course,” he says, voice thick and rasping with something Pete would almost be willing to call joy. Spencer laughs too, just as giddy, just as bright. 

“You fucking idiot, like I was gonna chose anything else.”

“Spence,” Brendon says, and then he’s letting go of Spencer’s body to press palms to Spencer’s cheeks. They pause for a moment and then Brendon is leaning forward and Spencer has a hand on the back of his head and they’re kissing, messy and desperate. 

Dallon looks up at Pete for a moment and his eyes are lost and confused and maybe a little scared. They lock gazes for a long moment and then Spencer is reaching up blindly, sliding a hand around the back of Dallon’s neck and pulling him down too. 

The noise Dallon makes next is quiet, a soft whine of combined surprise and gratitude that goes straight to Pete’s dick. 

Pete jolts and inhales. He’d forgotten this wasn’t for him. Forgotten he wasn’t one of them, not quite. Quietly he backs towards the door. 

Brendon is watching him go over Spencer’s shoulder, one hand clutching Dallon’s hair and the other braced on Spencer’s back. His expression is… distracted, but also apologetic, eyes dark and kind of sad until Spencer’s head tilts a little away from Dallon’s and Brendon’s eyelids flutter shut. 

Pete closes the door behind him and spends a moment palming his cock, half-hard in his pants. He’s not really feeling it though, there’s something yanking his ribcage tight and it aches. 

He tries to push it away, box it back into the back of his head. It only sort of works and he spends a long moment breathing in deeply, eyes closed. They sting a little bit. Pete isn’t thinking about it. He _isn’t_. 

There’s a coughing sound from further down the hallway. Pete opens his eyes. 

Patrick is staring at him. He’s sitting on the last step of the staircase, a straight shot to line-of-sight of what had been happening through the now-closed door. His expression says he’d seen everything. 

“Hi Pete,” he says. 

Pete shifts uncomfortably. 

“Hi Patrick,” he says. His voice comes out rough, and Patrick’s head tilts. There’s a look on his face that’s a struggle for Pete to recognize. 

It’s ugly, whatever it is, sort of like anger and sort of like disgust. 

“So have you fucked the whole band yet?” Patrick asks. 

His tone is teasing and light and completely fake. There’s something nasty seething just under the surface of it. Pete doesn’t know why Patrick had even bothered to try to hide it, Pete always knew. For his part, he drops the idea of lying as soon as it occurs to him. It just wouldn’t work. 

“It was just Brendon, one time,” Pete tells him. His voice comes out defensive and that’s not what he had wanted, not at all. “The heat of the moment or… or something, fuck.” 

That’s not right. It hadn’t been the _moment_ , god, and the inadvertent lie makes him feel a little sick coming out but he doesn’t know how else to phrase it. How the fear and the exhaustion had collided with Brendon’s smile. The headlights and the sense of relief and the desert. How it had been the right thing, the necessary thing to do. 

Patrick snorts and shakes his head. His expression is a twisted facsimile of a normal Patrick smile. 

It catches Pete like a punch in the ribcage, breathless and sharp and aching, hurtful in a viscerally physical way, because. Because it isn’t right. Patrick doesn’t get like this with Pete, this is rank betrayal in the purest sense. Pete wants to punch him a little, wants to cry a little, settles for sneering with as much sincerity as he can muster. 

“Why, you jealous?” he demands, juvenile and nasty. It’s only when Patrick looks away sharply that he has to drag in a breath and demand again with genuine questioning. “Are you, Pattycakes? Are you fucking jealous?”

He’s feet from Patrick by the last word. His legs tremble with the effort and exhaustion, adrenaline pounding through his veins. 

Patrick doesn’t meet his eyes, revealingly. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. 

“Liar,” Pete hisses accusingly. He’s shuffled so close to Patrick they’re almost knee-to-knee. He can smell him, sweat and Patrick and a cursory attempt at deodorant. It’s a tour smell, even the undercurrent of fear, the smell of Patrick just before he climbed a stage. It’s a sour and intrusive memory and Pete doesn’t want it, he _doesn’t want it_. 

The anger roars hotter in the base of his throat. 

“I’m not jealous,” Patrick croaks out, eyes down. 

He’s telling the truth. Pete falls back a step, something sick rippling through his stomach. 

“Then why are you upset?” he asks. He sounds like a child, he’s aware, a vicious child. But he’s tired and sad and aching and Patrick is making less and less sense by the moment. He’s allowed, damnit. 

“You don’t have to know fucking everything about me,” Patrick snaps venomously. “I don't know where you get off thinking you can just ask whatever you want, you never gave a fuck _before_.” 

Pete hauls in a breath against the hurt in his chest only to find himself snickering. It's thin and humorless and mean and Patrick's face goes pinched and shocked when he hears it. 

Christ, it's the funniest joke Pete's ever _heard_. The motherfucking apocalypse happens and they're still Pete and Patrick, still incapable of working out their differences without scarring each other in the process. Pete doesn't know why he ever thought any different, that the end of the world would change anything at all. 

“You're right, where do I get off?” Pete murmurs viciously, watching his words hit in Patrick's flinching. His next words aren't planned, Pete groping after whatever he knows will hurt Patrick the most, and he has to look away as he says them. “I think I'm gonna go. Head to Jersey next. See if the Ways made it. Look for Gabe.” 

Patrick hisses out a breath. 

“You’re leaving?” he asks, and the spiteful anger is gone now. It’s all fear. It tears at Pete but so does the anger. 

“Is there a reason to stay?” he demands, point-blank, and watches Patrick reel back. 

The regret is instantaneous, the desire to pull the words back in, to stuff them back into his lungs, to magic a way to unsay them. It’s impossible, even in the end of the world, but Pete wants it anyway. Patrick’s white with shock, hands bunched in the material of his pants. He looks, suddenly, so small. 

“Is there?” Pete prompts at last. 

“I can’t keep you here,” Patrick croaks and climbs to his feet. 

Pete’s left kneeling on the gritty ground, staring up at him. Patrick won’t meet his eyes, backing towards the door. “I mean, Gabe’s your friend.” 

“You could-,” Pete begins helplessly. The words line up neatly on his tongue, _you could come with me_ , but they die in the face of Patrick’s defeated expression. 

“You should do it, Pete,” Patrick says softly and he’s so, so tired. Pete can hear it in his voice and it aches that he knows him so well, can tell without even looking that Patrick’s at the end of his rope. “If you want to. Go.”

“I- I’ll come back,” Pete stammers, scrambling to his feet. He can’t stop an abortive motion at Patrick, reaching out like he’s going to catch hold of his sleeve again. He doesn’t know if that’s what Patrick wants to hear but he doesn’t want to _go_ , not if he can’t come back. 

Patrick looks at him for a long moment and Pete’s struck all over again by how terrible he looks. He looks like _hell_ , all sagging lost weight and deep shadows under his eyes. It hurts to see. 

He turns away, to head back down the hall. 

“You won’t,” Patrick mutters, so low Pete doesn’t think he was supposed to hear. 

He’s taken a step down the hallway before it falls into place in Pete’s head and he stumbles forward. He’s making a wordless noise, something that was supposed to be Patrick’s name but got lost somewhere between his head and his lungs. Patrick hears him anyway, is halfway through turning to look when Pete slams into him. 

It’s awkward, inopportune, Pete ends up with his face in Patrick’s hair and Patrick’s arm trapped between them. He clings anyway, hands clutching tight to Patrick’s threadbare t-shirt, pressing his face into Patrick’s shoulder. He smells like shit; Pete can’t stop breathing in. 

“Pete?” Patrick asks. He flails for a moment, twisting awkwardly in Pete’s grip until his hands finally come to rest. One on the back of Pete’s head, threading through his hair. The other on his back, warm and grounding. 

“I’d come back,” Pete says into Patrick’s shoulder. “Fuck you, I’d come back if you’d let me, I always will.” 

He means it, hopes Patrick understands he means it beyond this. Means it for every time he’s ever fucked up and walked away when he shouldn’t have, for what had almost happened to them before the end of the world. For all of it. 

Patrick’s hands tighten around him and he feels Patrick’s head press into his own shoulder and he knows Patrick understood. 

They stay like that for a minute, maybe longer. Pete’s happy that way, folded up in Patrick, as safe as he thinks he’s capable of feeling anymore. Patrick doesn’t make a move to pull away either, not until Pete’s starting to sway a little on his feet. He doesn’t pull away, not far, just enough that when Pete pulls his head up he can look Patrick in the face instead of a blurry close-up of his hair. 

There’s a beat of silence, more comfortable than it had been before. Patrick meets his eyes without flinching. Something about his face that Pete can’t place has changed, something that makes him look infinitely younger and happier. Something relaxed or uplifted. Pete’s chest swoops just seeing it. 

Momentarily Patrick’s eyes flicker. Down, and then back up. 

_Oh_ , Pete thinks dizzily, and leans forward. 

Patrick’s lips are dry and chapped and his mouth is open, with shock or maybe words. 

Pete pays that no mind, presses forward single-mindedly until Patrick yields and kisses back. It’s fireworks in Pete’s stomach, melting relief in his spine, heat in the pit of his stomach. Slowly he touches his tongue to Patrick’s bottom lip, a soft point of contact that has Patrick moving under his hands, tightening where he’s gripping Pete’s hair still. 

“Pete?” Patrick asks, gasps out, when Pete pulls back a little bit. He’s staring at Pete like he’s an alien, like he doesn’t quite comprehend what had happened. 

“’Trick,” Pete sighs, pressing forward until Patrick stumbles back against the wall. He can feel Patrick’s dick against his thigh, hot and hard and pressing against the material of his pants. His own cock is achingly hard, has been since Patrick had begun to kiss him back, since the first burst of melting heat in the pit of his stomach. 

“Pete, Pete, what?” Patrick asks, trailing off into a moan as Pete rolls his hips up experimentally. It’s clumsy but it has him gasping for breath, hands falling to Patrick’s hips for better leverage. Patrick’s hips roll up to meet his, almost involuntarily. 

“C’mon, ‘Trick, I want to, come _on_ ,” Pete urges, breathless, head threatening to fall back with how _good_ the friction on his cock feels, how hot Patrick’s dick is even through the denim of his pants. 

“ _Pete_ ,” Patrick says, almost a sob of a moan. His head falls back, hits the wall with a muffled thump, and Pete rolls his hips again to see the way the flush is working it’s way up Patrick’s neck. So red, so vibrant, and he attaches his mouth to it and sucks gently until Patrick’s swear in his ear, hand scrabbling at Pete’s hair but not quite yanking his head away. 

He’s still rolling his hips up to meet Pete’s, a desperate tempo that nonetheless remains infuriatingly rhythmic. 

A thought occurs to him, a fragmented idea that catches him low in the gut, and he’s slipping out of Patrick’s grip to fall to his knees before it even fully forms itself. 

Patrick gapes down at him stupidly for a long moment. 

“Can I?” Pete asks, breathless, leaning his cheek against the bulge in Patrick’s jeans and staring up at him pleadingly. He wants to suddenly, in a way he’s never wanted to before, not any of the times he’s done it. 

Patrick stares down at him for several long moments, mouth open and eyes wide and dark. He shuts his mouth with a snap and stares for a few moments longer. 

“Sure, Pete,” he chokes out at last, the crack in his voice ruining the sarcastic edge. “If you feel the need, go ahead.” 

Pete considers replying in sarcastic kind but then his dick gives a long throb of pain-pleasure and he hisses instead, palming himself and rubbing his cheek against Patrick’s bulge again, harder. Patrick’s hand lands in his hair as he does so. Just gentle pressure until Pete turns his head and starts to mouth the material, when Patrick’s hand convulses a little in his hair, griping tighter. 

Pete smiles a little bit, open-mouthed, and keeps pressing wet kisses to the damp material. 

“Pete,” Patrick gasps out after a few minutes. He sounds utterly ruined and Pete looks up to see that Patrick’s watching him, brilliantly flushed, pupils blown wide. He smiles guilelessly and noses at Patrick’s dick a little bit, reveling in the choked noise Patrick lets out, the faint noise of his head hitting the wall again. 

“Mhmm?” he hums, pressing a lazy palm against his own dick. It feels so, so good, Patrick’s cock against his cheek and the pressure of his own hand. 

“Please, Pete,” Patrick says, and his voice is shaking under the iron control he has on it. Pete considers for a long moment, still nuzzling at the bulge. 

“Okay,” he breathes at last. 

It’s the work of a moment to fumble Patrick’s button open, to pull his pants and boxers down his thighs in one motion. 

Patrick’s dick is not small. 

Pete spends a second looking at it. It’s big, and thick, and flushed. So hard it looks painful. His own cock throbs at the thought and Pete gives up on all pretense at dignity, pops the button on his jeans and shoves his hand in. 

Patrick hisses out a curse when Pete presses the first kiss to the head of his cock. His head hits the wall for the third time and Pete spares a thought to worry about concussion before the hand he has on his cock and the smell and taste of Patrick on his lips takes over and he moves on instinct, hot and frenzied and so fucking turned on. 

He can’t take all of Patrick, not even close, but he takes it more than halfway until he hits the back of Pete’s throat and he starts to bob his head a little bit. It’s wet, messy, and Patrick’s hand is tight in his hair. He’s moaning above Pete’s head, continuous and beautiful. Pete tightens the hand around his dick and moves as hard as he can in the constricting space allowed by his pants. He’s not going to last, heat is building to a fever pitch in his stomach and pulling his balls up tight and close, but…

“I can’t, I’m,” Patrick gasps out, and his cock is already twitching on Pete’s tongue. 

Pete dives down as far as he can and swallows, twisting the hand he has wrapped around the base of Patrick’s cock. Patrick comes a moment later with a low curse, thick and hot and bitter. Pete swallows and swallows again, pulls back to tongue at the head of Patrick’s rapidly softening cock. 

Patrick hisses, hauls Pete’s head back gracelessly by the hair and slips down the wall to land on his ass almost in Pete’s lap. Pete just groans, leaning back to give Patrick room and spreading his legs as much as possible to try for that last, aching bit of friction he needs. 

Patrick’s hand brushes the front of his jeans, knuckles grazing the tight curve of his dick in the denim, and Pete’s gone. He comes with a shout, all over himself, sticky and hot in his underwear. 

Abruptly Pete falls forward, resting his head awkwardly on Patrick’s chest and pants. It takes all of his remaining energy to tuck Patrick back into his pants without even bothering to do up the button. Silence falls between them for a minute. 

“Are you going to run?” Patrick asks at last, and his voice is all false bravado that makes Pete’s heart turn over. 

He heaves himself up and squints at Patrick. 

“Fuck you, of course not,” he says when Patrick’s started to shift uncomfortably under the weight of his gaze. 

“Good,” Patrick mutters and pulls Pete forward. He ends up cradled awkwardly between Patrick’s knees, and it’s not opportune when Patrick presses the first kiss to his mouth but it’s still good, it’s still so good and exactly what he needed. 

They kiss lazily for long minutes, a length of time that loses meaning, languid and unhurried and genuine. Eventually Pete lets his head fall to Patrick’s shoulder. He feels heavy and tired and content and it’s a new feeling. He thinks he could get used to it. 

“You still want to go,” Patrick observes when the silence has gone on long enough, tone neutral. “After Gabe and everyone.” 

Pete tiredly considers the thought. Patrick’s not wrong, is the thing. It doesn’t feel right anymore, staying in one place. And he’s scared for everyone he knows. He _does_ want to go after them. He just doesn’t know how to do it in a way that won’t ruin the delicate balance they just reached, and Patrick’s observation has uneasy fear stirring in his stomach. 

“…It feels weird to stop,” Pete finally admits in an undertone. 

“You should go,” Patrick says after a minute. He sounds oddly determined and his gaze is clear when Pete lifts his head to meet his eyes. 

Pete has to swallow a few times before he can breathe right. He thought he’d fixed this, done the right thing and made Patrick forgive him. This isn’t _right_ , having this and then having everything taken from him. 

“What?” Pete manages at last. “What did I do? I can do better, fuck-,” 

“Shit, no,” Patrick says hastily and drag’s Pete’s shoulders around to face him. Pete stares determinedly into his lap until Patrick’s fingers under his chin lift him to meet Patrick’s gaze. “I didn’t mean it like that, I do want you to stay.” 

“Then what?” Pete asks. 

There’s hope creeping through him, painful in his chest. Despite everything, despite knowing the fear, despite the instinct that tells Pete he’s going to be hurt because that’s what Pete _does_. He gets hurt. Patrick, he knows, wouldn’t hurt Pete on purpose. 

“You should go look for Gabe and his crew, and the Ways. That little gremlin My Chem had doing rhythm, and Ray.” 

“Frank’s a cool dude,” Pete says automatically. He’s not thinking coherently, the hope is blooming now, full and sweet and good.

“He’s a gremlin,” Patrick repeats, rolling his eyes, and Pete can’t really argue. “You should go looking for survivors. Hell, take Brendon and Spencer and that tall dude. Just... you have to promise you’re gonna come back.”

“Fucking, of course I would,” Pete breathes, feeling the grin break across his face like the sun. It feels warm and delicious, the purest happiness he’s felt in days, maybe in years. “We’ll be fucking _Rescue Rangers_ , this is _amazing_!” 

Patrick rolls his eyes tolerantly. 

“Whatever you want to call it,” he says. “You just… you need to come back. That’s my rule.” 

“Always,” Pete swears, and means it, maybe more than he’s ever meant anything in his life.

+8+

Hail beats against the window, thick and hard and rattling. It’s okay, though, the glass is strong enough to hold and it’s warmer inside under a mountain of salvaged blankets, tucked onto two pushed-together mattresses. Dallon is propped up near the window under the pink blanket that’s still nominally Brendon’s, staring out into the storm.

They’re a couple of miles from Jersey and they’re supposed to be bedded down for the night but Pete’s having the same amount of trouble getting to sleep he always does. For once Brendon’s right there with him, tucked up close to his side and breathing slightly too irregularly to be asleep. 

“Would we have made it big, if it weren’t for the apocalypse?” Brendon asks quietly, when they’ve been awake long enough for it to be almost early morning. 

Pete blinks at the ceiling a few times.

“Of course, dude,” he says at last. “You'd have found a hot wife willing to put up with your weird Disney fetish and had a zillion cute babies and the most successful band in the world.” He pauses to mull that over. “After Fall Out Boy,” he adds.

“I wouldn't have minded that,” Brendon says wistfully.

The room is silent for a beat. Pete wonders what he should be feeling. Guilt, maybe? Or like, nostalgia? What’s the word for missing what you could have had if the world hadn’t ended, Pete wonders. There should be one.

“But I don't have a Disney fetish, what the fuck.”

“Whatever you say,” Pete says smugly. “I bet you can recite every lyric from The Little Mermaid verbatim, right now.”

“If you guys don't shut up I'll kill you,” Spencer’s muzzy voice comes from Brendon’s other side. There’s some vaguely threatening rustling and then Brendon yelps and jolts over closer to Pete like Spencer had just punched him in the kidney.

“Okay, but that doesn't make it a fetish,” Brendon argues much more quietly a beat later. Pete rolls over and presses his grin into the pillow. He falls asleep like that, to the sound of Brendon muttering unhappily in his ear.


End file.
